What a powerful book! I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher.

This novel spans decades, following two characters. We have a young girl who is inspired into environmental activism by her grandparents, and a documentary filmmaker whose life is punctuated by the dogs she keeps, descended from a half wolf she rescues from Chornobyl.

The novel covers really important subjects, we look at issues we’ve already seen, and then environmental and social issues that we may face in the near future. The novel balances broad scale with the local impact too. Lucy is particularly concerned with the birds in her gran’s garden but then we also see political action, loss of habitat and species. There’s a lot of rage at what the characters and the world have to face in this story. It’s frightening how they have to battle not only the huge environmental issues, but also the violence and cruelty from other humans.

I feel largely positive about this book. The author made a couple of unusual choices in the writing construction. One is that the second perspective is written in second person. I didn’t mind this, it actually worked in this book and felt relevant to the recounting of that characters story. However this book was also written without speech marks. This was quite jarring and I found myself pulled out of the narrative flow to try and discern what was and wasn’t speech. This was a shame as it made the story feel stop/start in places which affected my immersion in the book. I’m sure these choices will be received well from a literary perspective for doing something unusual, however the lack of speech marks did affect my enjoyment of the book. Without this issue this would have been an easy five stars for the power of the book and the exploration of the content and how invested in felt in these characters.

This is the story of two British women over the next forty years or so, taking in climate change, eco-activism, rewilding and pandemics. It takes the form of pair of separate narratives that brush up against each other and overlap here and there as each chapter hops us forward a few years. Swift does a great job of keeping us up to date with these women’s personal lives and relationships over the decades while also sketching the political and social changes happening. She never flinches from the scale of the catastrophe facing us, but crucially offers hope and solutions instead of wallowing in doom. It’s tempting to read this as a smaller scale, more intimate, version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, but that isn’t necessary - it’s a more than good enough book to stand on its own. Plus it has some excellent dogs* in it. I really liked this one.

I was hooked on the fact it's set on Beltane so of course I had to read it! This is a very thought-provoking story that tells the tale of two women who reflect on their lives around a beltane fire many years in the future.
It follows their lives throughout the timelines - it's dual POV as well as has time jumping through chapters.

The story touches on climate change, the pandemic and Chernobyl disaster and outlines how they both dream of a time when there are wolves again, it's very speculative and insightful. I really enjoyed the concept of this book however I did prefer reading Lucy's perspective simply because Hester's is told in a sort of third person style using 'you do this' or 'you thought that' i just can't connect with stories like that unfortunately so it was a bit of a drag when I was reading Hester.

Hester is the filmmaker who returns to the Chernobyl site in 2021 to document the feral dog population and Lucy loves birds and her story starts during the pandemic in 2020 and grows to fighting for rewilding efforts in the UK.

Overall the story is interesting and full of thought.

A thought-provoking novel that follows the entangled but separate lives of two women looking back at events in the past at a point many years hence.

It follows a wildlife photographer and an environmental campaigner. Both are committed to their ideals and estranged with their families.

It imagines the impact of climate change on Britain and how rewilding and reintroducing new species could work to undo some of the damage…