Scottsdale Public Library

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2025

Call Number:	FICTION MCCONAG C
Format:	Book
Author:	McConaghy, Charlotte, author.
Title:	Wild dark shore / Charlotte McConaghy.
Edition:	First edition.
Publisher, Date:	New York : Flatiron Books, 2025. 2025
Description:	302 pages ; 25 cm.
Summary:	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.
Subjects:	Storms -- Fiction. Islands -- Fiction. Seed banks -- Fiction. Families -- Antarctica -- Fiction. Father and child -- Antarctica -- Fiction. Islands -- Antarctica -- Fiction. Social isolation -- Antarctica -- Fiction. Climatic changes -- Antarctica -- Fiction. Families -- Fiction. Father and child -- Fiction. Social isolation -- Fiction. Climatic changes -- Fiction. Nature -- Fiction. Survival at sea -- Fiction. Secrecy -- Fiction. Antarctica -- Fiction.
Notes:	Description based on publisher data.
LCCN:	2024018128 * 2024018128
ISBN:	9781250827951
Copies Owned:	20
Copies Available:	6
Current Holds:	0

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Sub-Antarctic noir meets a love letter to the rapidly disappearing wild world in McConaghy's latest (following Once There Were Wolves). Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of a remote island near Antarctica, home to the Shearwater research base and the world's largest seed bank. Rising seas have been threatening the island, and readers meet the Salts as they are considering evacuating the island with their precious seeds. When a woman named Rowan washes up on shore, the Salts take her in and nurse her back to health. As Rowan recovers, she gets to know the family: Raff, Dominic's oldest son, is doing his best to channel his grief and rage from tragic heartbreak; Fen, his 17-year-old sister, is such a water creature that she lives among the seals; and Orly, the youngest boy, is consumed with love for the natural world. Rowan shares pieces of her past with the Salts, but unraveling the island's mysteries brings them both closer to hidden truths. As the seas rise to swallow the island, a race against time tests each person's love and loyalty. VERDICT As lush as it is taut with tension, this novel is filled with both the joys and ravages of nature.--Julie Kane

Publishers Weekly Review

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. (Mar.)

Summary

REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB'S BOOK OF THE YEAR * LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

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
"Absolutely ASTONISHING. McConaghy's writing knocks me over every time." --Fredrik Backman
"SPELLBINDING...Exceptionally imagined, thoroughly humane." -- Washington Post
"My absolute FAVORITE book of 2025." --Carley Fortune

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.

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