In the three years since Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement berated literature for its failure to rise to the challenge of climate breakdown, fiction writers have made up for lost time. Indeed cli-fi, once a subset of science fiction, has been so quickly subsumed by realism that its days as a self-contained genre may be numbered.

The mass extinction of species has taken longer to percolate. While threatened ecosystems have sparked an explosion of powerful, elegiac non-fiction by Helen Macdonald, George Monbiot, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Katharine Norbury and others, novels about wildlife have stuck largely to their traditional habitat of the children’s and young adult shelves.

But here, too, change is afoot. Polly Clark was already a prize-winning poet when she published her 2017 debut novel Larchfield. Its successor, the unsettling, immersive Tiger, joins a small vanguard of novels – including Laline Paull’s The Bees, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and Richard Powers’s tree epic The Overstory - which approach non-human life in diverting new ways.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Polly Clark. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Evoking non-human minds demands a great deal of a fiction writer: the imagination to grasp and convey the instincts, habitats and characteristics of other species; the time, money, humility and charm to conduct deep research; and the restraint to avoid obvious pitfalls of anthropomorphism, zoological pedantry and romanticisation. Undaunted, Clark cut her teeth as a zookeeper in Edinburgh, then travelled to the forests of Siberia to track Amur tigers. The resulting novel is a startling, gore-splattered, nerve-racking exploration of how human and animal territories – both physical and psychic – collide. Here she is on a pregnant tiger, “always a tail tip away from catastrophe”, hunting:

If the creature was breathing, in range, the Countess would see it. If it dared to lick its lips, if it thought to raise its snout, she would see it.

She oriented her right ear towards the shift in air pressure. She heard, some ten lengths away, a breath. Not a creature’s breath: it was the breath of the atmosphere when it sets a creature down.

Bird. Coming in to land.

Clark’s human protagonists are also fierce, wary, endangered creatures, either by nature or circumstance. Frieda Bloom is a British primatologist struggling to function in her research job in the wake of a mugging that has left her with a dented skull and at permanent risk of cranial haemorrhage. She pilfers morphine to relieve the sense of vulnerability that has heightened her attunement to non-human signals. “Lately I had become possessed of a prey animal’s radar and was unable to resist the assault of fine emotional details. These were mostly unprovable, rendering me more like a dazed pilgrim recounting a vision than a scientist.” This almost hallucinatory bewitchment prevails in Frieda’s animal encounters, first with bonobos and then - after her addiction betrays her and she loses her job - with the Siberian tiger acquired by the ramshackle zoo that offers her a shot at redemption.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Lazo Reserve protected area, Russia. Photograph: Vladimir Medvedev/Getty Images/Nature Picture Library

So compellingly does Clark summon the precariousness of Frieda’s hold on her professionalism and sanity that it is a wrench when the story shifts its focus to Tomas, a Russian conservationist battling personal and political demons. That she succeeds is partly due to her evocation of the Siberian wilderness as a character in its own right. “The winter forest creaks but does not sigh … Here, trees shoulder time like a burden. There is no fight, only labour.” Burning, it becomes a “great gobble” of flame, “the wind crying and the trunks screaming … Heat scowled through the snow.”

It was Vladimir Putin who created the reserves that protect Siberia’s vanishingly rare tigers from poachers supplying the Chinese market with “remedies” for erectile dysfunction. But now the president’s envoy is to visit the vast territory that Tomas polices, and if he’s not impressed, the project itself is at stake. Having ratcheted up the tension with the discovery of a mutilated human body, in the third section Clark depicts the isolated, stubborn survivalism of Edit, an indigenous woman determined to reanimate the lost legacy of her tribe for the sake of her daughter. This sets the stage for a finale that is both satisfying and impossible to second-guess.

Combining the propulsiveness of a thriller with the raw yet meditative tone of a memoir, Clark writes with a poet’s ear and a naturalist’s eye, and has a deep grasp of the profound contract between indigenous peoples and the beasts they revere. She never loses sight of the endangered creature that forms the beating heart of a passionate, remarkable and uplifting novel.

• Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited is published by Bloomsbury. Tiger is published by Riverrun (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99