{Review and Q&A} Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy (@CharMcConaghy @FlatironBooks)

From the author of the beloved national bestseller Migrations, a pulse-pounding new novel set in the wild Scottish Highlands.

Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing fourteen gray wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska.

Inti is not the woman she once was, either, changed by the harm she’s witnessed—inflicted by humans on both the wild and each other. Yet as the wolves surprise everyone by thriving, Inti begins to let her guard down, even opening herself up to the possibility of love. But when a farmer is found dead, Inti knows where the town will lay blame. Unable to accept her wolves could be responsible, Inti makes a reckless decision to protect them. But if the wolves didn’t make the kill, then who did? And what will Inti do when the man she is falling for seems to be the prime suspect?

Propulsive and spell-binding, Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves is the unforgettable story of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves—if she isn’t consumed by a wild that was once her refuge.

​Inti Flynn has never been ordinary.  She feels everything and she feels it in a way that most people could never fathom. Growing up, she and her twin sister split their time between two worlds - their mother’s in the deafening city of Sydney and their father’s in the lush green forests of British Columbia.  
 
The trees always called to her in the same way that they did her father.  They made her feel whole and alive.  It’s that very feeling that was to determine the trajectory of her life. She just has to be careful not to let it drive her to that same kind of madness that eventually stole him away. 

I am unlike most people. I move through life in a different way, with an entirely unique understanding of touch. Before I knew its name I knew this. To make sense of it, it is called a neurological condition. Mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain re-creates the sensory experiences of living creatures, of all people and even sometimes animals; if I see it I feel it, and for just a moment I am them, we are one and their pain or pleasure is my own. It can seem like magic and for a long time I thought it was, but really it’s not so far removed from how other brains behave: the physiological response to witnessing someone’s pain is a cringe, a recoil, a wince. We are hardwired for empathy. Once upon a time I took delight in feeling what others felt. Now the constant stream of sensory information exhausts me. Now I’d give anything to be cut free.

​She’s come to Scotland in search of healing – both for her sister and for the Highlands.  Her goal as a biologist with the Cairngorms Wolf Project is to reintroduce the wolves back into the surrounding area in hopes of slowing the effects of climate change and to breathe life into it once more.  But some of the residents only see wolves as mindless killers and they are willing to back up that belief with bullets.  
 
So every single day, Inti must navigate the perilous lines between scientific truth, idealism, and the dark heart of man. And she soon come face to face with the terrible knowledge that there is a predator lurking inside us all.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can predict a wolf. That’s dangerous. She will always surprise you.

​Once There Were Wolves will literally change the way that you perceive all the living world.  Charlotte McConaghy has somehow managed to capture the very essence of what it means to co-exist alongside nature in a way that I’ve never experienced before.   
 
Every aspect of the story is perfect in its synchronicity - from her broken characters in all their visceral anger, to the verdant landscapes, and the fearlessness of the wolves themselves. It sparked with an intensity that left me feeling an unexpected combination of both fury and hope.  And I know now, that deep down, we are all capable of being a little monstrous…

~ A Q&A With Charlotte ~

1.  Your new novel follows a young woman, Inti Flynn, tasked with reintroducing several wolf packs into the Scottish Highlands. Through the course of the book, the reader really gets a sense of each wolf's personality, and they feel like such distinct characters, but they are distinguished from one another by numbers rather than names. Why did you decide not to name them? How did their individual traits take shape?

A lot of my research for this novel was reading first-hand accounts from the wolf scientists who worked on past reintroduction projects, such as the Yellowstone wolf project, and I was struck firstly by how incredibly distinct the personalities of the wolves were, and then by the fact that the scientists on the project very rarely gave them names, instead using numbers as a means of identifying them. Although I never found out why this was, it seemed to me that it might be a way for those working with the wolves to protect themselves a little against the inevitability of the wolves’ deaths. This became an important part of Inti’s character – her need to try to remain separate from the wolves emotionally, knowing that growing too close would be a danger she couldn’t afford. But soon the individual traits of the wolves would become impossible for her to ignore and the idea of not connecting with them futile. Their personalities took shape, for me, as I grew to know them and love them; I wanted to make them characters in their own right, distinct and unique. 

2.  Inti, our heroine, has a rare condition called mirror-touch synaesthesia that causes her to physically feel the hurt she sees others, humans and animals alike, experience. Was this the first part of Inti's character that came to you while you were writing?  

It might not have been the very first, but it was close. I’d wanted to write a character with this condition for a long time, ever since I heard about it on the Invisibilia podcast and been blown away by the strangeness and the vulnerability of how it works. I also knew from the beginning that this was going to be a book about empathy, so pretty quickly it made sense to me to have a protagonist who was uniquely placed to experience both the danger and vulnerability, alongside the importance and joy of empathy. 
 
3. Not everyone in the community is as empathetic toward the wolves as Inti. In fact, many of the farmers are resistant to their presence. How did you get into a headspace to imagine this kind of opposition?
 
The idea of killing wolves to me is anathema. Utterly incomprehensible. I just love them. But I knew I couldn’t approach this story in terms of good or bad. My dad is a cattle and sheep farmer so I spoke to him about how he’d feel if I said there were suddenly going to be wolves in the bush around his land. Understandably, he wasn’t impressed. The thought of yet another threat being introduced to his livelihood, which he works incredibly hard for under huge financial pressure was exhausting to him. So I wanted to approach the complexity of this issue with sensitivity for both sides of the argument; I wanted the book to have an ultimate sense of coming together rather than division, which meant it was important that both sides feel nuanced, true and understandable. 
 
4. The wolves aren't the only monsters in this story. Without giving too much away, can you talk a little about what the wolves reveal about our own human nature?  

I think we need the monsters to be wolves so that we don’t become the monsters ourselves. But it was important to me to shift the narrative that wolves are big and bad and things to be feared. What became staggeringly clear is that they’re shy, family-oriented creatures, capable of immense loyalty and generosity. Wolves have harmed very few people throughout history. It’s humans who harm humans. And I don’t think this is part of our intrinsic natures; I think it’s what happens when we move too far from wildness, which to me speaks more to the parts of us capable of nurturing, and of tenderness. In harmony with our surrounds. Living lightly upon this earth and kindly toward each other. The sort of behaviour we see in wolves.

5. Your first adult novel, Migrations, is also very much about the natural world and how our choices as humans impact the animals we share this planet with. What draws you to center your novels on this kind of wildness?

I guess I always try to write about the things that frighten me, and the things I love. I love animals, and I’m really, deeply frightened of the thought of a world without them. The loss of that takes my breath away. They have just as much right to be here as we do, and I hate seeing how they’re treated both directly and indirectly. I’m thrilled at the thought that we could be more like them than we realise, and that knowing this might help us to frame how we should treasure them. They’re crucial to our survival and the planet’s. Which I think means that our return to wildness, and our efforts to rewild this world, are the only way forward. 

6. What's up next for you?

I’m currently working on my next novel, which is set on a tiny sub-Antarctic island and will explore the idea of raising children in a dying world, and what our responsibilities around that are. It is also both a mystery and a love story, of course, because those are the most fun to write!

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