Wild Dark Shore
Reese's Book Club Pick (A Novel)
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4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • #1 AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR 2025
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (NPR, TIME, USA Today, The Economist, Scientific American, Good Housekeeping, Reader's Digest,BuzzFeed, BookRiot, HuffPost, Jezebel, The Globe and Mail, Kirkus, and more!)
"A breathtaking novel of ROMANCE, MYSTERY, AND TWISTS that will shock you...I love this book so much." —Reese Witherspoon
"A WILDLY TALENTED writer." ―Emily St. John Mandel
“SPELLBINDING...Exceptionally imagined, thoroughly humane.” —Washington Post
“Abounds with EVOCATIVE nature writing.” —The New York Times Book Review
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.
Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.
But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.
A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When a strange woman washes up on their isolated island, a family is forced to face their deepest issues in this lush literary thriller. Widower Dominic Salt and his three bereft children are preparing to leave their lonely island near Antarctica, where they’ve been caretakers to a vital global seed reserve. But when a woman named Rowan washes ashore, she discovers that the Salts’ story isn’t quite as straightforward as they present it—and the Salts soon discover Rowan has secrets of her own. Mixing climate science with the moody atmospherics of a gothic thriller, Australian author Charlotte McConaghy creates a profoundly moving work of psychological suspense. Setting her complex tale in a gorgeous, threatened setting and letting each of her distinctive characters voice their own chapters, she creates a world we could quickly sink into. Wild Dark Shore had us in tears even as we grappled with the mysteries at its core.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful and haunting tale of isolation and intrigue.
McConaghy does a masterful job of transporting the reader to a land a million miles away in a place we have never been and will never see. Despite this abstraction, each page feels as if we’re there. This rugged and unforgiving setting serves as the set piece in which a peculiar and driving mystery unfolds. As we move from character to character, each reveals a critical piece of the backstory.
Very different
Compelled to finish. Slow in spots but beautiful, descriptive prose.
Not very good
Really boring. The final 10% is good but getting there felt like work reading just to finish the book.