Critically acclaimed and internationally loved for her transcendent, conservation-focused literary fiction, Charlotte McConaghy returns with WILD DARK SHORE. This fierce and unyielding story is set on a remote island near Antarctica, where nature has elected to reclaim its vicious beauty...regardless of what the humans have to say about it.

Formerly a haven for whalers and sealers, the remote Shearwater Island is an even 120 kilometers squared. But it boasts more than 45 vascular plant species, more than 80,000 seals, the last colony of royal penguins in the world, and more than three million breeding seabirds. It is also home to the Shearwater Seed Vault, where more than three million varieties of seeds are housed safely in the island’s deep permafrost in case of apocalypse. If a natural event decimates the world’s farms and food-providing plants, the seed vault will be there to help with the rebirth.

As wildfires, floods and droughts begin to erode the mainland, the Salt family --- charged with protecting and maintaining the seed vault --- stands strong on their island, a perfect snapshot of nature’s beauty, tenderness and, yes, destruction. In many ways, the island is a portrait of hope, but it is also one of devastation. The Salts have lived there for eight years, witnessed numerous deaths, and taken a front-row seat to the ocean’s rising waters, eroding their island even as they fight to protect it.

"Populated with seals, penguins, whales, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous renditions of wild beauty, WILD DARK SHORE is Charlotte McConaghy at her best.... [It is] a gripping, unyielding work that breaks your heart and puts it back together again..."

Leading the family is Dominic Salt, who is spartan and disciplined, a problem-solver through and through. But since the death of his wife, just before they came to Shearwater, he has found three problems he can’t solve: his children. Raff is 18 and heartbroken; Fen is 17 and damaged; and Orly is nine and almost supernaturally wise. Dom knows the island’s sordid, bloody history, and he can’t deny that the air of death hangs heavy on the tundra. But it is only when he sees it reflected back in their eyes that he starts to wonder if the hauntings and isolation are just too much for three young people to bear.

Dom knows that their time on Shearwater is coming to an end. Funding has been cut, the researchers have departed, and he has been tasked with saving only the seeds he can. The rest will perish. But the island is also home to the Salt family’s secrets, and he will need to bury them once and for all if they are to resume a normal life on the mainland --- if a normal life is even possible amid the world’s destruction. And then the woman washes ashore.

Shearwater is 1,500 kilometers from land and not a tourist destination by any means; it’s too remote, too violent, and too lacking in creature comforts. So this woman, battered and bruised from the ocean’s waves and the coast’s rocks, couldn’t have come here by accident. The Salts tend to her wounds, warm her freezing body, and stifle her soaring fever, but the truth eventually comes out. Rowan has come to Shearwater looking for her husband, Hank, the lead researcher on the island. There’s just one problem: Dom tells her that Hank fled on the last boat out, too crazed by the impossibility of saving every seed, too desperate from isolation. But then why did his last emails to Rowan tell her that he was in danger and she needed to come fast?

It is obvious to both Dom and Rowan that they are hiding things from one another, but they are not naive to the horrors of the world, and they know that some secrets are worth protecting. Still, on an island that demands constant monitoring, small fixes and bandages, they must work together for seven weeks until the final ship comes to pack up centuries of seed and plant development and bid the island (and the rest of the seeds) adieu as they sink into the sea.

As the two strike up a casual, cautious camaraderie, Rowan sees the ache of Dom’s kids --- how they are obsessed with their deceased mother, worried about their father, and equal parts fearful and excited about returning to civilization. The children, in their purity and connection to nature, bond with Rowan almost immediately, even as she begins her own secret investigations to determine what really happened to her husband, why all the island’s communications have been cut, and why the Salts so steadfastly avoid certain parts of the island, with Orly whispering to the ghosts that he will never reveal their secrets. All the while, nature --- fierce and indomitable, urgent and inevitable --- reclaims her hold on the island, the Salts and humanity itself.

Populated with seals, penguins, whales, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous renditions of wild beauty, WILD DARK SHORE is Charlotte McConaghy at her best. McConaghy has always focused on discrete, disappearing facets of nature, and here she educates her readers on seed vaults: their necessity, but also their futility, the hope they inspire, and the devastation they reflect. Paired against the Salt family --- grieving and damaged, but so full of love --- the “character” of nature dances with McConaghy’s characters, pushing them into new levels of universal understanding, but also deep pockets of grief and searing awareness. Add to that the mystery at the heart of the book --- what really happened to Hank --- and you have a gripping, unyielding work that breaks your heart and puts it back together again, much like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. The cracks will always show, but they have become more beautiful as well.

This is the power of WILD DARK SHORE. You can never unknow the factoids McConaghy delivers --- the rising seawater, the extinct animals, the race against time --- but you also are left with a golden, glimmering hope, a sense that nature will continue long after us. There is a darkness to this message as well. Humans, as McConaghy demonstrates, will always save themselves first, but in the case of the Salt family, you will understand exactly why.