I have listened to this second book by Maja Lunde, and I really enjoy her flavor of climate fiction. However, this book didn't work as well for me as her previous book, The End of the Ocean.

The foundation of this book is a species of wild horses found in Mongolia. On this foundation, three stories are built: a nineteenth-century man who travels to Mongolia to bring horses back to Russia, a late twentieth-century German veterinarian who is working to return the horses to Mongolia, a Norwegian woman four decades in the future who is trying to save not only the last of the wild horses but also her and her daughter's life. Through these three lenses, we see the effort to save a population. Sometimes that population is the wild horses of Mongolia, and sometimes it is humanity.

While I found the story interesting, I felt this book bloated. Her previous book had 2 different timelines, and it was a much more streamlined experience. Three timelines are just one too many, and I felt that Mikhail's story was superfluous. While Karin's and Eva's stories work well together, Mikhail's just seems out of place. Every time Lunde cut to his story, I was immediately taken out of the story.

This book would have been much more impactful if it were just 2/3 of its current form. However, the 2/3 of the book that did work made this a worthwhile, if imperfect, read for me.