Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy is an engrossing novel about a woman, Inti Flynn, trying to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands after hundreds of years of them not being there. Her belief is that wolves will help the entire ecosystem come back to life. 

There with her twin sister, Aggie, Inti has mirror-touch synesthesia, where she feels in her mind sensations, including pain, that she sees happen to others. Aggie is a shell of her former self, communicating only with Inti, and often just barely, afraid to leave the house after the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. 

The locals in Scotland are generally against Inti's efforts to introduce the wolves, believing them a threat to their sheep and way of life. One of them, Stuart Burns, who had been beating his wife, Lainey, is found dead by Inti and she buries his body to try to prevent retribution against the wolves. She had developed a relationship with the chief of police, Duncan, becomes pregnant, and goes from believing it was Duncan who killed Stuart to thinking a wolf did it after Duncan gets attacked. 

Inti goes to try to find and kill the wolf and gives birth in the forest, with she and the baby almost dying from exposure, but wolves curled around them for warmth. Her sister then finds them in the forest, and after Aggie takes the baby to get her help, one of Inti's adversary locals comes and saves her. She later learns it was Aggie who killed Stuart, and almost killed Duncan, in an effort to protect her. 

The book feels very unique, with it wild, raw, and visceral, containing a huge connection with the natural world. It's also about love and loss and finding your way through pain in your world, and contains lovely language, with Inti "halved and doubled at once" after the birth of her child.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy tells the set in the future story of Franny Stone, who arrives in Greenland with the purpose of tracking the world's last flock of Arctic terns (deer, wolves, and bears are already extinct). 

The book is McConaghy's debut novel and seems to hit on many of the same themes and emotional constructs that she covers a few years later in her novel Wild Dark Shore, with the more recent book a bit tighter of a read. It felt as if McConaghy developed further her craft as a writer, something both logical and kind of inspiring.

Franny joins with the crew of the Saghani, and the boat travels to the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Her quest is revealed as an attempt to fulfill a desire of her late husband, Niall, and it's a nice ending to the book. 

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is a compelling, dark, and lovely novel set on Shearwater, a fictional island based on Macquarie Island halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. The book features the characters of widower Dominic Salt, his three children Fen, Raff, and Orly, and a woman, Rowan, who washes ashore while coming to try to aid her husband, who was the lead botanist on Shearwater.

The Salts had been on the island eight years, with Fen seventeen-years-old, Raff eighteen, and Orly nine. Dominic is caretaker of Shearwater, in charge of fixing things broken, but the people on it a bit broken inside. Dom would speak to his wife, who died of cancer at the time of Orly's birth. Fen sleeps at the boathouse to create space for herself, and Raff's boyfriend Alex committed suicide on the island. 

Shearwater is a fascinating setting in the book, with it housing an enormous seed bank containing some three million varieties of seeds. It's there to preserve plants from going extinct, especially in the fact of climate disaster threatening the global food supply. Reference is made throughout the book to deteriorating conditions in the outside world, with fires, floods, and food scarcity. The island is also natively home to plants that don't grow in other regions and the kids' connection to the animals of Shearwater, particularly the whales and seals, is great reading. 

Weather conditions on the island deteriorated, and the Salts and Rowan are waiting for the scheduled boat to come six weeks off to evacuate them and the seeds they deem most vital to be saved. It comes out that Rowan's husband Hank had an affair with Fen, thirty years his junior, then wanted to drown all the seeds as he wouldn't have been able to take them off the island and couldn't bear to pick some, but not others. He then tried to drown Fen when she told him she might be pregnant. Around this same time, Alex's brother Tom and his research partner Naija drowned, Alex killed himself, and then Rowan washed ashore. The Salts told her that Hank had left the island, not that he was being held in advance of the rescue ship coming to Shearwater.

The book hops back and forth between first-person narration by the various characters ands that makes it a somewhat disquieting read, but it pays off at the devastatingly beautiful end, with the seed vault starting to flood and Rowan giving Orly her last breaths so that he can live. In the afterword, McConaghy notes having been on Macquarie with her sixteen-month-old son, and how awe-inspiring the island was.