When There Are Wolves Again is out today in the UK.

I’m proud and delighted and hugely grateful that it’s out in the world. The hardback edition is a truly beautiful object which has been produced with much love and care by my publisher, Arcadia. You can read some early reviews of the book on Fantasy Hive, Runalong the Shelves, A Reader of Else, and a deep dive on Strange Horizons. It was also one of New Scientist’s SF picks for October 2025. 

I am all the happier the book is out there as for a while, I wasn’t sure if I’d get it over the line. 

When the novel was contracted back in June 2023, I had little more than a few thousand words and a brief pitch, with fifteen months to deliver a polished manuscript around my day job. Despite the joy of having a contract, and knowing this book would definitely be published, I was in a place of very low confidence in my work. This might sound strange, given that my previous novel, The Coral Bones, had been the best received of my books to date, with good reviews and award nominations. But I had also spent two years on submission, trying to sell The Coral Bones, receiving rejection after rejection for what I believed to be a strong manuscript on a timely issue. As every writer knows, it’s the failures that linger with you, and I think that two-year window had a long tail. (I worked out recently I’ve spent around nine years of my professional writing life with books on submission; this is probably not an uncommon story. And I am one of the lucky ones – The Coral Bones did eventually find a home with Unsung Stories.)

Writing is a constant oscillation between belief and doubt. Both are necessary but I went into Wolves full of doubts, about the premise, about my ability to deliver on it. A good friend said to me recently, ‘You had to run at this novel’, and I think they were right. I ran at it. I worked almost every weekend of that fifteen months, made my deadline, and things were looking good for the planned publication. I was halfway through my copyedits early in 2025 when I received, out of the blue, a diagnosis of breast cancer.

My editor would have moved the publication date in an instant if I had wanted, but after all the work to get the book in on time, the thought of it being delayed was heartbreaking. Instead, we worked together to get it through production. The book took on another role, became something for me to aim for: a beacon of hope at a tumultuous time.

I worked through my page proofs, at the pace of a snail, around surgeries. The proof copy of the book arrived the day after my second operation was cancelled, at five pm outside the operating theatre, due to complications with an earlier patient (who fortunately was okay). In my last week of radiotherapy, I heard that Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work I have been in awe of for many years, had sent a blurb for the novel. So, in the way that narratives can sometimes help us chart a path through stormy seas, the journey of When There Are Wolves Again has become strangely and inextricably interwoven with this interlude of my life, which has often felt like inhabiting an alternate reality.

I am fortunate to now be in remission, and very much hope that will be the end of this particular story. I’m eternally grateful to the multitude of NHS staff who have got me through my treatment, for their many kindnesses, and the friends and family who have looked after me and shown such love and compassion. And if you, or a loved one, are going through something similar, I wish all strength to you.

So to everyone who has bought a copy of this book, given an endorsement, reviewed an ARC, and helped spread the word: thank you, so much, for giving When There Are Wolves Again the gift of your time. It really means a lot.

As for the book itself… I thought I would share a few words I wrote earlier this year, when proof copies were making their way to the first readers.

Perhaps you, like me, have spent nights unable to sleep, worrying about the future. Not only for your loved ones, but for all the glorious, madcap, more-than-human world to which we belong.

Perhaps you have children or grandchildren, or friends who do, and you wonder how much of that wondrous world will be left by the time they’ve grown up.

Perhaps you’ve sometimes wanted to howl at the moon.

If any of this resonates, this book is for you.

These thoughts were on my mind when I first started thinking about rewilding, and access to nature, and the species who once shared our UK landscapes: the lynx and the bears, the beavers, the wolves, and so many more who are lesser known. I’d written about climate breakdown before, with The Coral Bones, and I’d tried to show how we got here and where we might end up if no action is taken. That future was hard to write, but all too easy to imagine.

Turns out it’s so much harder to imagine a future with hope.

Especially when it feels like our beautiful planet has never seemed so breakable or so under siege. But that’s what I wanted to do with Wolves, to imagine one possible way forward, through the many challenges to come that we know are baked in. I wanted to think about what might happen if action was taken. What might be gained, as well as what could be lost. And of course, about the human and non-human animals who might get caught up in that journey along the way.

My character Lucy is five years old when the novel opens, full of curiosity and joy for life. Hester, a filmmaker, is thirty-five, uncertain where she’s ended up, or how to reconcile her past. I wanted to know where their stories led. So I kept writing. 

I kept running.

In the novel, Hester observes how light transforms all that it touches. I hope this novel brings you a little piece of light.