Brogen Murphy's gripping new survival story

Debut novelist Brogen Murphy has written a gripping survival story set in an imagined future where nature has been restored

Brogen Murphy’s inspiration for Wildlands came – fittingly – on a long train journey. They describe the initial story inspiration as a “flash”, a vision of a vast rewilded landscape stretching across the heart of Britain. From there, the inspiration needed tying down and, for Murphy, that meant asking lots of questions to get facts and a sense of place. It helped that they had studied Zoology at Cambridge and had more than a passing knowledge and interest in flora, fauna, landscapes and our planet.

Even so, overlaying a rewilded landscape over the agricultural, urban and suburban patchwork traversed on a typical train journey through the heart of Britain took time. “I wanted one thing that wasn’t real – which was setting this in my version of the future – but beyond that I wanted everything to be very grounded and realistic and tangible.” says Murphy. This meant hours poring over Google Maps to set the narrative in a real landscape, albeit reimagined plus wild animals and landscapes.

With utopian setting in place, enter our protagonists Astrid, 13, and her much younger sister Indie. They are on a high-speed journey from London to Glasgow across the vast wilderness zone known as ‘Wildlands’ – it’s a place their mother helped create. When their train makes a temporary stop, a mishap with Astrid’s phone means the girls exit the train. Then it pulls off and they are left by the track, with no mobile signal and plenty of scary animals in the vicinity. They need to find their way back to safety through wilderness.

This becomes an epic trek, and the sense of place is vivid thanks to all that time spent on Google Maps. “The journey is a real timeline – the distances, the landscape.” Research also included hours down search engine rabbit holes to be accurate on, say, a fish found in a specific habitat or the way a landscape would evolve without human intervention. “I want to do that service to the readers. If I’m going to take them on an adventure through somewhere, I don’t want to skimp on it,” says Murphy. “The Wildlands is a real place, and readers have been right through it.”

“We owe it to children to stop just telling them the world is broken – we owe it to them to say: ‘it could look like this’.”

The adventure is gripping and so too the shifting dynamic between the sisters. Astrid is nursing a family secret and, at the start of the action, she’s angry and disillusioned – with some of those emotions spilling over into her behaviour towards Indie. “For me, it’s capturing that natural sibling relationship,” says Murphy. “I wanted the tension and the conflict and the humour that comes from that.” There’s a satisfying story arc, with the sisters surviving thanks to teamwork, and growing closer along the way. “I wanted it to mean something when they unite by the end. If they had finished where they started, then what was the story for?”

Even though the author was (very briefly) a climate activist before a career in clean technologies, this is a story with strong positive message on environment – presenting a world where nature is in rude health. “If you tell people the world is broken and it’s too late it’s going to lead to anxiety and despair,” says Murphy. “We owe it to children to stop just telling them the world is broken. We owe it to them to say: ‘it could look like this’.”

And Brogen Murphy says there’s every reason have hope on that front. “When I wrote the core of this book, which was six years ago, this all seemed ludicrously ambitious. I’m not suggesting it’s even feasible – my wildness – but in only the time I’ve been writing this book, so much has happened. We have bison back in the UK. Stork chicks are breeding successfully… I remember thinking, ‘where’s the most audacious place I can put a beaver?’ and now it’s actually happening – the beaver is back’.”