I didn’t think a novel could combine such different themes as rewilding and domestic violence in the way that Once There Were Wolves does, and add a murder mystery element into the mix as well! Charlotte McConaghy particularly impressed me by her realistic depiction of the sometimes childish and wholly exaggerated conflicts that wolves cause between people - specifically between conservationists and farmers.

Wolves really are a main part of the story, which starts when they are reintroduced into the Scottish Highlands in the hopes of reviving the forests. We follow the leader of the project as her attachment to the animals grows deeper, the distrust among the characters escalates and different forms of violence are revealed both in the past and present.

“There are languages without words and violence is one of them.”

I could recognize so much of the conversations from what I hear here in Finland, where wolves have never gone extinct but where they’ve never ceased to cause conflict. The writing is beautiful and the twist in the end completely surprised me - the perfect end to a perfectly paced book. I mean, Once There Were Wolves has everything I wanted: environmental themes, suspenseful plot and gorgeous prose. The only thing I had some trouble with was understanding some of the reactions people had to certain situations, but that’s very minor. All in all I loved this book a lot and The Last Migration is now high on my TBR, in fact I’ve already reserved it from the library.

“My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart.”