When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift is a 2025 speculative climate-fiction novel about two women, a changing Britain and the possibility that ecological repair can outlast a human lifetime. A 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award report names it the winning book, and its story explains why a novel about wolves, grief and rewilding can hit with the force of a personal elegy.
Swift does not build toward a neat technological rescue. She follows Lucy and Hester through roughly 45 years, showing how activism, wildlife work and political choices accumulate until their lives meet in a Britain of about 2070. The result is hopeful climate fiction, but its hope is earned through loss, patience and practical work.
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What is When There Are Wolves Again about?
The novel alternates between Lucy and Hester, whose stories begin in different places and eventually converge. Lucy grows up during the Covid lockdowns, an experience that shapes her into a grassroots campaigner for British rewilding and ecological justice. Her path is personal as well as political: the book asks what it means to inherit environmental damage and still decide to organise for a different future.
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Hester is a documentary filmmaker whose work takes her to the wildlife zone around Chernobyl. There she studies animals living in a landscape marked by catastrophe and brings a Chernobyl wolf-dog hybrid back to Britain. Hester remains connected to that animal’s descendants, making the return of wolves a family and ecological story rather than a single headline event.
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Their narratives stretch across about four and a half decades. Instead of treating 2070 as an isolated future setting, Swift shows the small decisions, campaigns and compromises that could lead there. The time span also gives the novel room to consider climate action as an intergenerational project: one person’s campaign may become another person’s normal landscape.
Why does the novel feel hopeful instead of dystopian?
Swift’s future is not free of climate damage or political conflict. Its optimism comes from restoration that is specific enough to imagine and difficult enough to matter. The book treats ecological recovery as work carried out by communities, scientists, farmers, campaigners and governments over many years.
Rank #2
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Rewilding has visible, physical consequences
Species reintroduction and habitat repair are central to the story. Beavers reshape waterways, while the return of lynx and wolves changes how people understand the British landscape. These animals are not decorative symbols: their presence forces arguments about land use, risk, farming and who gets to decide what a healthy ecosystem looks like.
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The novel places lab-grown meat, vertical farms and rapid decarbonisation alongside rewilding. That combination matters because it avoids presenting conservation as separate from everyday life. Reducing pressure on land, changing food production and cutting emissions become part of the same attempt to make room for other species.
Rank #3
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Hope is treated as a choice, not a prediction
Award director Tom Hunter described the book as an “ambitious study in the power of long-term hope in the face of climate breakdown.” He also argued that science fiction is often most powerful when it shows that no single future is inevitable. That is the novel’s governing idea: a better outcome is possible, but only if people keep choosing actions that make it more likely.
What makes the wolf-dog thread so emotional?
Hester’s Chernobyl wolf-dog hybrid gives the novel a concrete line through time. The animal’s descendants connect a damaged European landscape with a future British one, turning questions about borders, belonging and conservation into intimate ones. The family line also makes extinction and survival feel tangible: readers can follow what is carried forward, what is lost and what changes in a new environment.
Rank #4
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Lucy supplies a different emotional register. Her activism grows from the helplessness of watching environmental destruction, especially after the isolation of lockdown. The book does not dismiss that grief or hurry past it. Instead, it lets grief become a reason to build networks, defend habitats and imagine institutions that can survive beyond one campaigner’s lifetime.
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Swift has said that she wrote from “a place of deep grief about what we are doing to the more-than-human world” and wanted to create something more hopeful to counter paralysis. That tension explains the tears: the novel acknowledges what cannot simply be repaired, then asks readers to care about repair anyway.
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How does it compare with other climate fiction?
Reviews have placed When There Are Wolves Again near solarpunk, hopepunk and “thrutopia” — stories that move through crisis toward a difficult, positive future. Its approach differs from climate fiction built around collapse, survival puzzles or spectacular inventions.
| Comparison | When There Are Wolves Again |
|---|---|
| Future outlook | Recovery remains possible, but it is slow, contested and incomplete rather than guaranteed. |
| Story engine | Lucy and Hester’s relationships, work and changing beliefs carry as much weight as external plot events. |
| Solutions | Rewilding, species reintroduction, altered food systems and decarbonisation take priority over technology-led spectacle. |
| Closest comparison named in coverage | Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, particularly its ambition to imagine a positive response to climate breakdown. |
That makes Swift’s novel a useful choice for readers who want climate fiction that is emotionally serious without ending in total collapse. It is less interested in a single breakthrough than in the cumulative effect of policies, habitats and relationships.
What award did the book win?
The 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award report says Swift won the science-fiction prize for When There Are Wolves Again. The same report gives the prize money as £2,026 and says 132 books were submitted by 52 UK publishing imprints and independent authors. Those figures are reported by the award coverage; an official award-organisation page was not available to independently confirm them at the time of writing.
Five Books also lists the novel among the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke shortlist. The Great Wild Word’s 2026 review lists the book at 304 pages. Edition, territory, stock and price can vary, so readers looking for a When There Are Wolves Again E. J. Swift book should check the current retailer or library record for their region.
Who should read it?
- Readers who want hopeful or “thrutopian” climate fiction rather than a purely dystopian ending.
- People interested in British rewilding, ecological justice and the politics of bringing back lost species.
- Anyone who prefers character-led speculative fiction that follows consequences over decades.
- Readers drawn to stories about wolves, Chernobyl wildlife and the emotional cost of environmental loss.
The book still expects readers to face grief, compromise and uncertainty. Its promise is not that every ecosystem will recover, but that a damaged future is not the only future available.
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