‘Wild Dark Shore' is a captivating novel set in a very remote place

Washington Post

07-03-2025

Shearwater, the fictional island where Charlotte McConaghy has set her captivating third novel, 'Wild Dark Shore,' is 120 square kilometers of sinking tundra in the middle of the vast southwestern Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Tasmania and Antarctica. Many thousands of miles from the nearest neighbor, it's terra firma for more than 3 million seabirds, 80,000 seals, the last remaining colony of royal penguins and one very isolated family of four.
For eight years, Dominic Salt and his children have been caretakers of this remotest of outposts, a tall, thin slip of land with an old lighthouse, field huts and a communication station. The island was the tiny research base for scientists who until recently had come to study wildlife, weather and tides. Most important, it is also home to the Shearwater Global Seed Vault, owned by the United Nations, 'built to withstand anything the world could throw at it' and 'meant to outlast humanity … in the event that people should one day need to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.'
But the protective permafrost is thawing, 'the ocean has taken great mouthfuls of the land,' and storms of increasing ferocity keep coming, washing away rocks and beaches and buildings. The vault is so imperiled by flooding and microgrid collapse that Dominic is in a race against time to save the most essential seeds for relocation. The researchers have all left — or so it seems — some under unsettling circumstances, and the Salts plan to abandon the place, too, within the next six weeks.
'Wild Dark Shore' falls into a growing and welcome category of climate fiction that imagines a future not purely dystopian, not centered so much on elaborate world-building as on how human beings adapt, survive, and continue to seek beauty, solace and communion in the face of the relentless challenges of an increasingly inhospitable environment. It's unclear exactly how many years or decades from now McConaghy's story takes place. There's mention of cellphones, satellite internet and Wikipedia, and though the electricity keeps failing, heightening the plot, the world isn't yet in total collapse.
People such as the Salts offer cause for hope: Dominic, a widower raising three children and protecting the planet from future starvation with indomitable grit; Raff, 18, a boxer and musician, at once angry and tender, raw with grief over the loss of his mother and a young man he once loved; Fen, 17, who spends her days among the seals and is herself fin-footed, 'like a wild animal who has stepped free of a life under water'; and Orly, 9, so beyond precocious in his knowledge of seeds and plants that he can all but see their inner lives.
Onto the scene, washing in with the tide, comes a fifth character, Rowan. Her small boat has capsized in rough seas, and deadly currents have tossed and battered her onto the sharp-toothed rocks close to shore, where Fen swims out to rescue her. She and the rest of the family nurse Rowan back to health. Who Rowan is and what she's doing here are a mystery for a while — McConaghy is a master at leaving trails of breadcrumbs for the story-hungry seabirds among us. We come to learn that she is looking for her husband, Hank, a senior botanist and research base team leader for the seed vault. He stopped replying to her attempts to reach him, and she doesn't know why or where he's gone. It turns out that Dominic and his family do.
McConaghy keeps the novel moving at a blustery pace, thanks to her deft plotting and shared point of view. We get all five perspectives, some in first person, some in third, mostly in short chapters titled with the name of whomever we'll briefly follow. This allows us to see all the characters as full-fledged individuals, with histories, fears and desires, and also as a community, to learn what secrets each is keeping and why. McConaghy's abundant gifts for character and story mask the occasional half-hearted description, as when Rowan remembers first meeting her husband: 'He is neither big nor small in stature. Neat brown hair, handsome but forgettable face. Not particularly remarkable.'
A few sentences like these can be forgiven within a concept and atmosphere so spellbinding. And haunting. This desolate island is full of ghosts: Dominic's late wife keeps appearing to him, her breath on his cheeks, her whisper in his ears; Orly hears the voices of seals brutally hunted over the centuries for their skins and oils; and Fen sees their specters, 'flickering green lights out at sea.' The researchers left traces as well, shadowy leads that Rowan must pursue. To read this exceptionally imagined, thoroughly humane novel feels like following the last people on Earth as they prepare to leave some part of their souls to the most beautiful place they'll ever know.
Porter Shreve is the author of four novels. He directs the creative-writing program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
By Charlotte McConaghy.
Flatiron. 302 pp. $28.99