Wild Dark Shore

January 1, 2025

Dominic Salt and his children are the last remaining inhabitants of a tiny island near Antarctica that has been affected by climate change. When a woman washes ashore during a storm and finds a place in their family, their pasts--and secrets--may threaten their future together. Bestselling McConaghy's (Once There Were Wolves) latest receives a 250K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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January 6, 2025
Australian writer McConaghy (Migrations) depicts in this urgent if uneven saga a family’s attempt to survive on a desert island in a near future ravaged by climate change. After fleeing Australia eight years earlier due to fires, floods, and other natural disasters, Dominic Salt lives with his three children on Shearwater Island, a remote former research outpost between Tasmania and Antarctica, where he tends a seed vault meant to replenish global food supplies. His wife, Claire, died before the voyage, and he still has conversations with her in his mind. During a storm, his oldest daughter, 17-year-old Fen, rescues a woman named Rowan who washes ashore following a shipwreck. Radio contact with the outside world is impossible, as all the island’s communication systems have been mysteriously destroyed, and it turns out that Rowan’s missing husband, Hank, was the team leader of the island’s research station. McConaghy ratchets up the tension as the characters’ paranoia and mutual suspicion increases and their motives are revealed, though she scuttles the momentum with predictable romantic subplots, and a late-stage plot twist strains credulity. For the most part, though, McConaghy blends entertainment with a sobering message about conservation and the impacts of geographic isolation. Readers of climate fiction ought to check this out. Agent: Sharon Pelletier, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

Starred review from January 15, 2025
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica. Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication--what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie andThe Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island--loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site--is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island's caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs "to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us." One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she's come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic's kids, especially 9-year-old Orly--who never knew his mother--become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light--along with buried bodies--mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters' internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity. Readers won't want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.

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January 21, 2025
In Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel, the aptly named Salt family are the last caretakers of a seed vault on an ocean-battered subantarctic island. In the final weeks before the base is set to be shut down, the island’s secrets are at risk of being exposed when a mysterious woman washes ashore. McConaghy, who won acclaim for her previous literary eco-thrillers Migrations and Once There Were Wolves, delivers the same winning formula in Wild Dark Shore. While the constant unveiling of new traumas sometimes left me wishing for more time to reflect on their significance, this is a gripping story with genuinely surprising and largely satisfying twists. Drawing inspiration for the novel’s setting from a trip to Macquarie Island, McConaghy expertly conveys the awe-inspiring majesty of the extreme climate and terrain of the fictional island, bursting with rich and remarkable natural life. The novel’s environmental themes are a highlight, particularly the discussions around the impact of climate change on our homes and the difficult choices we face in preserving what matters most. These complex moral issues are given emotional resonance through McConaghy’s memorable characters. Her depiction of the mingled pain, joy and tension in the parent-child relationship is especially striking. Thrilling, romantic, and with an atmosphere of gothic mystery, Wild Dark Shore contains echoes of Hannah Kent and Daphne du Maurier, overlaid with timely modern-day concerns.

Starred review from February 1, 2025
The humans in McConaghy's harrowing third novel, following Once There Were Wolves (2021), are wholly compelling, but the main attraction is the setting: wild and imperiled, subantarctic Shearwater Island--rightful home to seals and penguins, but also the site of a global seed vault. This venture spawned a research center in addition to the old lighthouse where the Salt family lives, helping scientists tend to the seeds, the veritable future of the planet's biosphere, as drought, megastorms, and wildfire lay waste to the land. But rising, battering seas are undermining the island, the vault, and the sanity of the scientists and the Salts: widower Dominic, oldest son Raff, teen daughter Fen, and young, precocious Orly. Fen prefers the company of seals, so she is on the shore when the pounding waves deliver a shipwrecked woman. Rowan, the injured stranger, recovers under the family's care, but all are beset by an unnerving atmosphere of tension and distrust, hauntings and secrets. Still, Rowan joins the Sisyphean attempt to save the seeds, and love blooms. McConaghy's descriptions of nature's glory and terror are galvanic, the psychological struggles wrenching, the suspenseful action spectacularly choreographed. McConaghy has attained new heights of intensity and lacerating ecological conviction in this complexly plotted, tragic, and all-consuming tale of the battle to survive in a catastrophically changing world.

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