When There Are Wolves Again, by EJ Swift

This novel won the Clarke Award last week, and well deservedly. It's the tale of two women, Lucy and Hester, between 2020 and 2070, from Covid lockdown through the climate emergency to a... well, that would be sad to spoil.

Lucy is six when we meet her, sent to bubble with her grandparents in their house in Herne Hill, where she falls for the teeming life in the garden. She seems to be, though I don't think it's ever quite stated, neurodivergent, and this exasperates various grown-ups around her in ways we only glean. We often have to read between the lines with Lucy to why others behave as they do.

Hester is a few years older than Lucy and, when we meet her, in Ukraine to record a documentary about the wild dogs of Chernobyl, once the pets of the people who had to flee the nuclear disaster. While there, Hester adopts - or smuggles out - a wolf/dog and, back in the UK, falls on difficult times. Then her documentary does well and she can look for other projects to document. That includes efforts to rewild the heat-ravaged country.

As with Octavia E Butler's The Parable of the Sower, it's unsettling to start a story in the past, catch up with the present and then simply keep going, as speed - it's almost like we've taken flight. Swift is very good at keeping us grounded. For all the details of buildings made of mycelium, people flying to Mars and other sci-fi innovations, things feel ordinary and real.

For all there are exciting moments, what really makes this work is the characterisation, of the two protagonists and those they encounter. Sometimes there are big dramatic moments, sometimes personalities just clash, or people are a bit over-tired. Yet Swift makes us want to spend time with these people, whether they're in a fight or just nattering in the firelight. When people and dogs, inevitably, die we really feel their loss.

Lucy and Hester have frequent near-miss encounters, and by the end are aware of one another though they haven't met. We get to know their families, their conflict, their heartbreaks, and there's the antagonist of people in denial about climate change and the urgent action needed to mitigate its effects. It's sometimes funny, sometimes thrilling and horrific, and shot through with warmth and humanity. I really liked it.

I'm not sure I was aware of it while reading, but looking back I think it's a novel exploring the idea of redemption - that we can do something to repair the damage we've done, to our world, to our communities, to each other. Friends fall out and make up again, a brother and sister come to uneasy terms about an inheritance, a violent bad guy is faced, and nature is restored.

Along the way, there's lots about our individual and collective relationship with nature, and ideas about how things might be, if not fixed, then made better. That includes gas dirigibles instead of airplanes, rewilding on an epic scale, and a huge programme in transferring private land to the common people. It's not easy, but the effort and the progress made gave me hope. How strange, how uplifting, to read a book about coming catastrophe and feel we might get through it, if we change how things are done.