In The First Thousand Trees, Premee Mohamed brings the trilogy that began with The Annual Migration of Clouds to its denouement — and the tone she strikes is less spectacle than sober reckoning. This is a story steeped in the aftermath: of guilt, of change, of what’s left when the fight is over but the world must still be lived in. The protagonist, Henryk, is no heroic figure. He’s been marked by his past, ostracized in his home, and now drifts toward a new community in hopes of redemption and purpose. His destination is Sprucedown, a remote settlement reborn after catastrophe, where planting trees is not just labor but ritual. But the promise of a fresh start collides with the harsher truth that rebuilding doesn’t erase history — it complicates it. Mohamed charts Henryk’s journey with clarity: he wrestles with belonging, identity, and the fact that in a broken world, the hardest question isn’t can you rebuild, but how.

Mohamed’s prose works in layered ways. On one level, the setting is post-climate-collapse Canada: communities nurturing forested land, battling ecological and social decay. But the novel never stops at setting. The real drama is in Henryk’s internal landscape — the guilt he carries, the uncertainty of loyalty, the distance from the life he once had. Scenes of quiet labor — planting saplings, learning new roles — and of discord — suspicion, moral ambiguity — mesh into a narrative that is reflective rather than frenetic. One of the novel’s strengths is how it allows space. Pacing slows, not due to lack of action but because the weight of things unspoken is given its own room. The novel asks: what happens after the major crisis, when people must figure out how to live rather than simply survive? In that respect, the story feels rich, even if its scale and immediacy differ from blockbuster dystopias.

That said, there are caveats. Because this is the final part of a trilogy, some threads feel less fleshed out than readers might prefer. Henryk’s path is sometimes opaque, in part because the story leans into introspection and metaphor. For large-scale plot-seekers or those expecting a conventional finish, the resolution might seem open-ended, with more questions than definitive answers.