Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

This might just be my favorite literary fiction release of 2025. I know it's only March.. so this is me saying something.. I hope you listen.

I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve read in the category of *literary fiction* these last two years.. Picking up these books in that time has only seemed to magnify my own feelings of loss or make permissible the painful things we do and the things that are done to one another. It didn’t feel like morality or justice, and maybe that seems silly to turn to reading for that, but the world is broken, and I like so many was needing to understand how to live better and love more in spite of it.

Shearwater is based on Macquarie Island

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Exposure

So let’s talk about Wild Dark Shore. This is Charlotte McConaghy’s third traditionally published title, and my first exposure to her work although Migrations has been on my list to read quite some time. Really it’s just been a timing thing — I didn’t own any of her books, but I also had that feeling that her books weren’t going anywhere (kind of how I feel about Brandon Sanderson), and taking a step away from literary fiction for the past couple years meant that I wasn’t prioritizing stories like this. I don’t exactly remember the catalyst for picking up Wild Dark Shore. Following my own logic, I guess you could say the timing was right. All you need to know is that I started listening to the book on Libro (supports Indie Bookstores) and then immediately got a physical copy. This doesn’t always happen, but I will say in a perfect world this is a book that I would encourage you to listen to and read physically. The narration gives so much life to these characters but the way McConaghy puts things into word so brilliantly and earnestly will have you needing to highlight, underline and doggear to come back to..

Also, Dominic Salt’s voice… swoon

image from pinterest

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Brief Summary

This book follows a family — Dominic Salt and his three precocious children of varying ages — who are caretakers of a seed bank, the largest remaining, on a tiny island called Shearwater near Antartica. Shearwater is based off of a small island called Macquarie Island where McConaghy traveled while working on developing this novel and although I have never been here, she truly does transport you (I’ve heard this is a gift of hers in all her previous works). On Shearwater the sea-levels are rising, it’s time to pack up what seeds this family can before they are all lost (both the seeds and themselves). But in the midst of this, a woman is seen in the sea, gravely injured and alone. Her name is Rowan and she is searching for someone on the island.. someone who has disappeared without a trace.

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My Thoughts

What McConaghy does here is no short act of brilliance.. I don’t think I’ve encountered a writer who so skillfully and thoughtfully gives voice and depth to each of their characters and the characters’ relationships to one another. Nothing feels shallow or lacking. I fell in love many times over; I was constantly questioning what would happen next, trying to find the secrets, trying to find the truth. I am not a mystery or thriller reader, but every story requires some unknown thing, some reaching for what is unclear or hidden. It is a necessary tool to pull you through a story, to keep you going, keep you curious, and right from the beginning I was not only hooked, but equally pulled to shore, with the tension never abating. Your guard is up, and like these characters, you’re not sure what or who you can trust — but you want to, God you want to trust these people.

What I admired most is that at its core this felt like a family story (and truly, a parenting story, which might seem boring or unsexy, but damn, pick this up and you will understand the falsehood of that idea). Wild Dark Shore is a story about what we do, and the lengths we will go to hold onto one another — how even in loss, we are anchors in the storm.

The theme that stands solidly alongside this is the intentional focus on the natural world, which again I’ve gleaned is a ever-present focus in McConaghy’s writing. In this she urges us to look at the sinking, burning world around us. You can feel yourself on the island of Shearwater, you can imagine the ghosts and all their pain, you can feel the warmth on your face outside of Rowan’s home, the warmth of fire.

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I finished this book the evening before the inauguration and once I finished, I wept. I wept so deeply, so fully. Even if the story didn’t end in the way I’d wanted, I understood why it ended the way it did, and there was so much beauty and balance in it. I could understand how the story itself made me emotional, but it also loosened something in me that needed to be let out. I told my friend Kevin about this experience the next day — my uncontrollable weeping and swollen eyes — and to this he said, “I had this session with my therapist awhile back and she told me:

Sometimes when we cry it’s not just that we cry for our own circumstances,
but rather it’s like we are crying for the entire world.

How poignantly said. How true that felt for me, as if I was crying for the world — not just for this story, my own loss, but for this collective pain that binds us all and the earth. The natural world is being destroyed, creatures are not being protected; innocent people and children are experiencing a genocide; people I know and love are moving through incredible grief. And it was as if in reading this, I was being invited to feel this all, to see it and say this is real, and we need to give a fuck.

I do not think or perhaps do not remember a story that has made me feel all this at once.

image from pinterest

This being said, I think it is important to also be very clear though — although this is a story about loss, about the destruction of the world, of life, the question of why care for anything when loss and death come still? This is also a story about why and how we love rightly. It made me feel all those real and heavy things while also reminding me of the power of love, being truly seen, cherished, honored, fought for, protected. Love that is brilliant and bright and full of sacrifice. Like most deeply true things, we see this truth in the children, in their belief that there is still something worth living for, believing it, fighting for.

They show us the reverent truth that despite the difficulty of being alive in the world, loving rightly, despite loss, is our anchor in the storm. How even though “there is such peril in loving things at all… I can also feel a sense of pride, that I am able to keep doing it.” (paraphrased from text).

In closing, this book is so many things.. a mystery, a ghost story (didn’t mention this at all but it was such a unique addition), an ecological story, a family story, a love story… It was a life raft, sent out to pull me back to the things I know and have always held true. It pulled me back to a piece of myself.

Thank you for reading. With careful attention,
xx M