Book Club: Read ‘Wild Dark Shore,' by Charlotte McConaghy, With the Book Review
Charlotte McConaghy's latest novel, 'Wild Dark Shore,' opens with an enigma: A mysterious, half-drowned woman washes ashore.
The stranger's name is Rowan, and she has arrived on Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica. The island, which houses an important seed bank, was once teeming with a community of scientists, but now the project is shutting down, the workers have left and the land lies quiet and deserted, everybody gone except for the Salt family.
Composed of the patriarch, Dominic, and his children — moody Raff, animal-loving Fen and precocious Orly — the Salts remain as stewards of the island and are tasked with preparing the seed bank for its ultimate closure. Each is lost in his or her own way, and all are hiding terrible secrets.
They're not alone. Rowan herself has come to the island with a hidden purpose, putting this small community on a crash course for a long-overdue reckoning.
In August, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss 'Wild Dark Shore,' by Charlotte McConaghy. We'll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on Aug. 22, and we'd love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by Aug. 14, and we may mention your observations in the episode.
Here's some related reading to get you started.
Our review of 'Wild Dark Shore': 'In 'Wild Dark Shore,' we're shown why a person might withdraw from the messiness of life after tragedy and trauma. … The novel also offers its injured characters a path back to connection and community, a risk McConaghy argues must be worth taking, no matter how fraught the future, no matter how temporary the family.' Read the full review, by Matt Bell, here.
The American Bookseller Association's interview with McConaghy about 'Wild Dark Shore': ''Wild Dark Shore' is about fear. Fear of how perilous the world grows, fear of the future we are facing, fear of the life we are leaving to our children, and how we are going to keep them safe. Ultimately, I think it's an exploration of how we love in the face of this fear, in the face of loss.' Read the full interview here.
Our review of McConaghy's previous novel, 'Once There Were Wolves': 'This is a heartfelt and earnest novel — in every chapter, there's evidence of a writer straining for the cathedral cadence, that elegiac note of aching significance — but sincerity doesn't guarantee a satisfying read.' Read the full review, by Harriet Lane, here.
Our review of McConaghy's debut adult novel, 'Migrations': 'This novel's prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet's landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates.' Read the full review here.
We can't wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
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Atlantic
4 days ago
- Atlantic
Again and Again
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway turned 100 this spring—not quite double the age of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who, as Woolf writes, 'had just broken into her fifty-second year.' The book pops up less frequently on lists of the best fiction of the 20th century than James Joyce's Ulysses, the libidinous classic to which Dalloway is often read as a side-eyed response. But I would put it right alongside that epic, near the very top, because it rewards rereading at various stages of life. As Hillary Kelly wrote this week in The Atlantic, 'The novel's centennial has occasioned a flurry of events and new editions, but not as much consideration of what I would argue is the most enduring and personal theme of the work: It is a masterpiece of midlife crisis.' First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway, as many readers do, when I was in college, and it lit up my still-maturing brain. Like Ulysses, it takes place over a single day in June, pulling together a group of narrative perspectives to capture the physical and mental cacophony of modern city life. Its characters include Clarissa, who is about to host a high-society party, as well as Septimus Smith, 'aged about thirty,' a veteran of World War I who ends up jumping to his death. The juxtaposition of life and death, war and peace, youthful fury and wistful wisdom, reflects Woolf's ambition to deploy stream-of-consciousness style in the service of deep emotional realism. One of the first works of literature to depict what would later be known as PTSD, it is in part about the dangerous passions of youth. And yet its title character is 51, married to a politician, and worried that she has forsaken a more adventurous life. Woolf writes that Clarissa, setting off to buy flowers, 'felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.' I know the feeling—now. When I first read one of the book's most pivotal scenes, in which Clarissa learns of Septimus's death during her soirée, I interpreted the moment as the reality of war intruding on a bourgeois order oblivious to its own decline. It is that—but it is also the specter of mortality that underpins the anxieties of middle age. As Kelly reminds us, Clarissa thinks: 'In the middle of my party, here's death.' Yet this thought is immediately followed by an intense affirmation, Kelly writes: 'She steps into the recognition that, despite the decisions she's made, or perhaps because of them, 'she had never been so happy.'' Kelly finds parallels between this realization and a turning point in Woolf's own life: At 40, in a moment of respite from her mental illness, she managed to write this book, and then her equally classic novel To the Lighthouse. This was, Kelly writes, 'a season of fruitfulness' in which 'she produced her most profound work.' At 21, I was ambivalent about Dalloway 's conciliatory ending, in which a woman keeps dread at bay by learning to revel in small and ordinary pleasures. But today, I look forward to the year, not far off, when I will be Clarissa's age, so that I can read the book again, and see it with the kind of fresh eyes that only time and reading glasses can provide. Mrs. Dalloway's Midlife Crisis By Hillary Kelly Virginia Woolf's wild run of creativity in her 40s included writing her masterpiece on the terrors and triumphs of middle age. What to Read The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe Wolfe loved big, colorful characters, and he found plenty of them in the cadre of postwar American fighter pilots who helped develop supersonic flight—and, later, manned spaceflight. Wolfe's subjects risked their lives in the skies over the California desert in military planes, then went on to join NASA's Mercury program, becoming the first Americans in space. They quickly became Cold War celebrities whose virtues embodied a particular vision of heroism: competent, courageous, ready to lead the world to a new and limitless frontier. But in his account of the early space race, Wolfe contrasts their boy-band glamour with a more laconic aeronautical hero: Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier while secretly nursing broken ribs and later pushed a juiced-up supersonic fighter beyond the edge of the atmosphere, barely surviving the ensuing crash. Skilled, relentless, and taciturn, Yeager embodied 'the right stuff'—that hard-to-define quality that the boundary-breaking pilots and astronauts ended up prizing above all else. — Jeff Wise Out Next Week 📚 The Unbroken Coast, by Nalini Jones 📚 To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, by Jon Lee Anderson Your Weekend Read Marc Maron Has Some Thoughts About That By Vikram Murthi Back in the 1990s, when Marc Maron began appearing on Late Night With Conan O'Brien as a panel guest, the comedian would often alienate the crowd. Like most of America at the time, O'Brien's audience was unfamiliar with Maron's confrontational brand of comedy and his assertive, opinionated energy. (In 1995, the same year he taped an episode of the HBO Comedy Half-Hour stand-up series, Maron was described as 'so candid that a lot of people on the business side of comedy think he's a jerk' in a New York magazine profile of the alt-comedy scene.) But through sheer will, he would eventually win them back. 'You always did this thing where you would dig yourself into a hole and then come out of it and shoot out of it like this geyser,' O'Brien recently told Maron. 'It was a roller-coaster ride in the classic sense.'
Atlantic
05-08-2025
- Atlantic
Mrs. Dalloway's Midlife Crisis
Mrs. Dalloway always had gray hair. She first appears in Virginia Woolf's debut novel, The Voyage Out (1915)—trilling, ladylike, often imperious, and looking 'like an eighteenth-century masterpiece,' with a pink face and 'hair turning grey.' She doesn't seem to age or regress between The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, which was published 10 years later and is now celebrating its 100th anniversary. In that novel, her hair is tinged the same color, and she has 'a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious.' Then the kicker: 'though she was over fifty.' The novel's centennial has occasioned a flurry of events and new editions, but not as much consideration of what I would argue is the most enduring and personal theme of the work: It is a masterpiece of midlife crisis. Woolf was 40 when she began writing the novel, a decade younger than her protagonist but in the midst of what she called her own 'middle age.' As she chronicled in her crackling, astute diary, it was a moment to weigh what one has made and can make of a life. For Woolf, it ignited a creative fire. In the summer of 1923, about halfway through her work on Mrs. Dalloway, she wrote, 'My theory is that at 40 one either increases the pace or slows down. Needless to say which I desire.' She went on to catalog her extensive ongoing projects, including an essay on Chaucer, the revision of a slew of old essays, and what she termed ' 'serious' reading.' And all of this came during a sustained burst of fiction writing that Woolf—whose work had been derailed by mental breakdowns and spells of illness—relished. From the fall of 1922 through 1924, she got Mrs. Dalloway on paper at a furious rate; in doing so, she reckoned with the incongruity of middle age as she lived it. The defining feature of midlife is its formlessness. It takes the shape of what it is not—not youth, not old age. (Is 40 old or young? How about 50?) Yet it's a phase of massive transformation: for some an interlude of welcome stability in which they can take stock, for others a time to take new risks. It doesn't want for literary examples—the work of recent fiction writers including Rachel Cusk, Tessa Hadley, and Miranda July, for example, revolves around women reflecting on their choices midway through life. In content, if not in style, they all owe something to Mrs. Dalloway. From the June 2024 issue: Miranda July's female-midlife-crisis novel The novel's opening—with its famous first line, ' Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself'—is itself a kind of middle. It launches the reader into Clarissa Dalloway's morning, into 'life; London; this moment of June.' Early on a Wednesday in 1923, in the shadow of the Great War and an influenza pandemic, Clarissa is buying those flowers for a party she is throwing that evening. The rest of the novel follows several characters in a series of streams of consciousness: Clarissa as she experiences the unfolding hours and prepares for her guests; her former lover, Peter Walsh, who wonders whether he can consider his life a success; a World War I veteran named Septimus Warren Smith, who is quickly descending into shell-shock-triggered madness; and a variety of other Londoners. Over the course of that single June day, they contemplate one another, their world, and their places in it. Clarissa, the wife of a member of Parliament, has chosen a comfortable existence and a stable partner—perhaps at the expense of adventure. But she was once an almost wayward girl, tempted to marry Peter and embark on a more unorthodox course. She ponders all of this as she moves through her busy day, mentally lurching forward and backward in time. And as she does so, she considers her actions in light of her age. When she walks to buy the flowers, for instance, she asserts that 'she felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.' Peter unexpectedly comes to visit after years in India, touching off a torrent of thinking about whether she is past her prime: 'It was all over for her,' she thinks. 'The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow.' And as she readies herself and her house for the party that evening, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole. Age's attendant regrets and hopes have spurred a crisis inside Clarissa. It's also highly plausible that she has entered menopause, or what Woolf later termed in her diary 'T of L' (for 'Time of Life'). Clarissa has recently been ill, but in deflecting the mention of a friend's 'women's ailments,' she makes clear that whatever hormonal flux is or isn't happening, this is not a subject she'll discuss. She is the right age for it, and she does see herself as 'shrivelled, aged, breastless.' What might more readily bring about a crisis of identity than the physical alteration of the body, the change from bearer of life to barren woman? Clarissa's more existential fear is one that occasions so many midlife crises—that at 51, she has missed out on some superior array of experiences; that another path would have led to a fresher, happier variant of herself. Woolf's trademark stream of consciousness, her quick and seamless moves from one character or experience to another, means that the past, present, and future intertwine as if no barrier separates them. And so Clarissa does not ponder her past so much as move through it. The touchstones of her youth—a kiss from her insouciant friend Sally Seton, a transcendent evening spent on the terrace of a country house, her near engagement to Peter—are as alive to her as the mending she does that morning or the lonesome death she imagines for herself in old age. From the April 2023 issue: Searching for Virginia Woolf on the Isle of Skye That aliveness and sense of immediacy are what animate Woolf's prose—and her heroine. Clarissa eventually basks in the unmitigated joy 'that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park.' Her memories, she tells herself, are mostly good. As the day progresses, she thinks that 'middle age,' at least for her, is 'mediocrity,' but then summons her inner wisdom and will to force 'herself with her indomitable vitality to put all that aside.' The core of the novel is Clarissa's realization that life is happening in the present tense, and so that is where she ought to be. M rs. Dalloway was written at a personal turning point for Woolf, too. She moved in early 1924 from a Georgian brick pile in the suburbs of Richmond to a townhouse in the bustling London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where her social calendar often outpaced her. She had initially gone to Richmond for the quiet and rest that her doctors and husband insisted she needed. That is, until Woolf began a campaign to move back to London proper, where, she wrote, she could 'dart in & out & refresh my stagnancy.' London was one of her great loves, and the observations in Mrs. Dalloway of its vibrant atmosphere were Woolf's as well. The change of scenery freed the author to rattle herself in the service of her art and, despite continuing to question her abilities, finally declare pride in her fiction. Although she would live only 17 years more, committing suicide in 1941, this was the beginning of Woolf's middle age. It was a season of fruitfulness before she succumbed to the mental illness that had stalked her—a period in which she produced her most profound work. The pleasure she found in London—in the movement of bodies on the sidewalk, the towering spire of St. Pancras Church—and therefore in life, was so potent because it cast her inner darkness in relief. Woolf, who had endured the deaths of siblings and both parents, who had been confined to bed on a milk-and-meat diet during multiple breakdowns, was determined, especially in Mrs. Dalloway, to place life next to death, to surround midlife with the delicious pleasures of both youth and maturity. For one brief period, and in one magnificent, enduring novel, life emerged the victor. About a year and a half into writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf encountered a dangerous anniversary, that of her mother's death in 1895, which had occasioned immense distress in 13-year-old Woolf. Yet on this day, she shook off her malaise and wrote, 'But enough of death—its [ sic ] life that matters.' That day, she recalled how even the simplest chore, weeding, had earlier sent her into fits of ecstasy, describing 'how the quiet lapped me round' and then 'how the beauty brimmed over me & steeped my nerves till they quivered.' Clarissa finds herself in a similar moment at her party: Death has shown up on her doorstep in the form of the news that a young man—Septimus Smith—has thrown himself from a window and died. 'Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death.' But then she steps into the recognition that, despite the decisions she's made, or perhaps because of them, 'she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long.' From the April 1939 issue: Virginia Woolf on the art of biography The clock strikes, the party begins to disperse, the old lady across the street turns out her light for bed, and Clarissa Dalloway notes, 'What an extraordinary night!' What an extraordinary day.
New York Times
25-07-2025
- New York Times
Book Club: Let's Talk About ‘The Catch,' by Yrsa Daley-Ward
In this month's installment of the Book Review Book Club, we're discussing 'The Catch,' the debut novel by the poet and memoirist Yrsa Daley-Ward. The book is a psychological thriller that follows semi-estranged twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who were babies when their mother was presumed to have drowned in the Thames. The novel begins decades later, when Clara sees something strange: A woman who looks just like their mother is stealing a watch. Clara believes this is her mother, and wants to welcome her back into her life. Dempsey is less certain, in part because the woman doesn't seem to have aged a day. She believes the woman is a con artist because it's simply not possible for her to be their mother … right? What's real? What's not? And what does that mean for the lives of these struggling sisters? Daley-Ward unpacks it all in her deliciously slippery novel. On this episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin talks about 'The Catch' with his colleagues Jennifer Harlan and Sadie Stein. Other books mentioned in this week's episode: 'The Other Black Girl,' by Zakiya Dalila Harris 'The Haunting of Hill House,' by Shirley Jackson 'Wish Her Safe at Home,' by Stephen Benatar 'Erasure,' by Percival Everett (you can listen to our book club conversation about it here) 'Playworld,' by Adam Ross (you can listen to our book club conversation about it here) 'The House on the Strand,' by Daphne du Maurier 'Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,' by Max Porter 'The Furrows,' by Namwali Serpell 'Dead in Long Beach, California,' by Venita Blackburn 'The Vanishing Half,' by Brit Bennett 'Death Takes Me,' by Cristina Rivera Garza 'Audition,' by Katie Kitamura We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
