Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy
Wild Dark Shore is Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel after the huge successes of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves. It’s a stunner, set on an island between Australia and Antarctica, loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site and research station where scientists have been studying environmental change.
McConaghy sets up the novel as a thriller, and the story is an intriguing one: For years, widower Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in this natural paradise. But due to climate change, sea level rise is happening so fast the island will soon disappear. A boat is going to be picking the family up in seven weeks, the timeline of the novel, and the family is packing up what they can of the precious seeds that have been kept in a vault in case the world’s food supply needs to be regrown after environmental catastrophe. All the researchers have left, and the family is alone on the island.
Into this tense situation a woman, Rowan, washes up on shore, just when Dom discovers the island’s communications equipment has been sabotaged, cutting them off entirely from the outside world. McConaghy slides between all five characters’ points of view, alluding to but not explaining various mysteries that pile up and keep the suspense high. I found some of the plot aspects strained plausibility, but what’s undeniable, and makes the book a must read, is how McConaghy’s plunges you into this evocative setting and her truly endearing characters, most especially the youngest boy, Orly.
McConaghy writes as hauntingly of their emotional and inner lives as she does the captivating penguins, birds, and seals they live among. Thematically the book is equally rich, weighing questions like, if the world is coming to an end, do you embrace love? What do you save, the practical or the beautiful? Besides an elegy for nature, Wild Dark Shore is about families, and parenting, and choosing hope despite grief and loss. This is a gorgeous, heart-pumping, heart-wrenching and mesmerizing read.