I feel bereft after finishing Wild Dark Shore, a contender for the novel of the year and even the book of the year, I already know this although it’s only January. It could be a recency bias, but I loved this even more than Migrations, McConnaghy’s first adult novel.

Set on Shearwater, a fictional remote island between Tasmania (not a fictional SE island/state of Australia) and Antarctica, the novel is centred around Dominic Salt and his three children, Raff, 18, Fen, 17 and Orly, 9 years old. Dominic is the caretaker on this island, who’s been raising the children by himself for 9 years since his wife and mother of his children died.

One day, a woman washes up on the island. She’s barely alive, broken and slashed by the water and the rocks. This event doesn’t make sense, no boats are coming that way, so the hows and whys ensue. The four of them take care of Rowan who recovers slowly.

The four people are the last remaining humans on the island, waiting for the rescue boat in a few months. You see, the island is sinking and they're trying to save precious seeds held by the seed bank, that's defrosting and sinking.

McConnagy has created such extraordinary characters. They’re all different, flawed, interesting – hard to forget. Rowan herself is mysterious, obstinate, and lost in more ways than one.

McConnaghy beautifully unpeels the many layers of each character, they’re all dealing with grief and loss, loneliness and desperation. Other important characters are nature, the island, the animals, and the weather. It wouldn’t be a McConnaghy novel if one of the most important themes weren't climate change and its dire consequences.

But among all the realistic gloom and doom, there’s love and hope.

Congratulations and thanks to Charlotte McConaghy for giving us such a beautiful novel.

A must-read novel!

The latest from Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore (releasing March 2024) is a mix of family drama and climate fiction, as are her 2 previous books (Migrations, Once There Were Wolves).
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Set on a remote island, the Salt family are the caretakers who maintain a research station and a storage facility with seeds of every species of tree that exists. With rising seas and climate change the seeds are more important than ever. One evening a woman washes up on their shore. Atmospheric, mysterious, and full of family drama, it was very hard to put down.
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I LOVED this! She’s one of my faves after absolutely loving Migrations so I had very high expectations, and this did not disappoint. She’s on my automatic read list, and the way she drip feeds the background, weaves in climate change, brings in nature and the animals, develops the characters, and makes you fall in love with them (particularly Orly) - just brilliant! One very clever lady.

Firstly, thank you thank you thank you to Penguin for the ARC!! Ever since I picked up the Chronicles of Kaya in my local bookstore in 2016, Charlotte McConaghy has been one of my absolute favourite authors, so when I saw this on my shelf on Netgalley, I scrumpt many screams. And now I have SO many thoughts!!!!

Firstly; by the end, I absolutely loved this. I stayed up far too late last night finishing it, glued to the couch, and cried and cried and cried through the last 20 pages. The third act was phenomenal, and everything I’ve come to expect from Charlotte’s cli-fi.

I did, however, find myself surprised by some little frustrations with the first half. I’ve never had issues with the writing itself in the past, but there were some sentence structure things that just didn’t read as smoothly as I wanted them to. I am, at my core, a chronic comma user, but there were sentences in Dom & Rowan’s POVs that just felt… unfinished/ not as smooth as they could’ve been with what felt like odd punctuation/ structure choices. Because of this, it took me longer than I expected to find myself fully drawn into the characters and story.

Once I was though… ughhhh I loved it. I loved the way that the different POVs were written, I loved loved loved the setting, and above all I wish I could quote it, because there was one line at the end of a chapter maybe 3/4 through that just struck me in the guts. This was a book about people and nature; the impact that we can have on each other if we let it happen, and the impacts that happen even when we don’t. Devastatingly hopeful even through the parts that are devastatingly sad.

I LOVE YOU CHARLOTTE!!! Thank you for this gift of a story- I’ll be thinking about the ending for a while, I think.