Wildlands

LoveReading4Kids Says

April 2025 Debut of the Month

Two young people are left to survive alone in a dangerous wilderness, far from any other humans in this unusual future-set story.

It’s 2050 and Astrid and her little sister Indie are travelling by train from London to Glasgow, a journey that takes them through the Wildlands, a huge area of northern England and southern Scotland forcibly cleared of its human inhabitants and rewilded as a sanctuary for wildlife, wolves and bears included.

Their mum was involved in its creation and Indie is excited to look out from the train windows, Astrid less so, particularly as she’s recently discovered secrets her mothers kept from her which have changed her view of them and herself. When the sisters accidentally fall from the train and are left with little more than the clothes they are wearing, this becomes a gripping survival story.

Living on apples and items salvaged from an abandoned house they find themselves with less and less to protect themselves and at the mercy of nature, threatened not so much by wild animals, more by their own unfamiliarity with the world they are in. Brogen Murphy creates a convincing and vivid natural world, simultaneously appealing and threatening. We need to read to the very end to find out if the girls survive and this is an absorbing adventure, Astrid’s distress about her family adding depth to a story that makes you think about our place in the world.

Andrea Reece

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