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Business Wire
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Business Wire
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy Claims Top Spot on Amazon's Best Books of 2025 So Far List
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- (NASDAQ: AMZN) today revealed the Amazon Books Editors' Best Books of the Year So Far list, with Charlotte McConaghy's taut, psychological novel Wild Dark Shore earning the coveted No. 1 position. The Amazon Books Editors describe the novel as 'leaving you breathless, wide-eyed, and in awe of the extraordinary power of fiction.' Rounding out the top five selections are King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby, No More Tear s: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, and Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. The Amazon Books Editors recommend titles from the widest selection of books available to make it convenient for customers to discover new titles. Share The Amazon Books Editors recommend titles from the widest selection of books available to make it convenient for customers to discover new titles that will delight, inspire, and educate. The Editors read thousands of books annually across genres to inform their Best Books of the Month, Best Books of the Year So Far, and Best Books of the Year selections, as well as publishing themed round-ups and author interviews on the Amazon Book Review. The Best Books of the Year So Far list showcases their top 20 picks from January through June, along with the top 20 books in popular categories including literature and fiction, mystery and thrillers, romance, history, biographies and memoirs, cookbooks, and children's books. This year, the Amazon Editors also added the top 20 books in romantasy and discovery reads (debut novels). Wild Dark Shore joins an illustrious lineup of previous Best Books of the Year So Far No. 1 selections, including James by Percival Everett, Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré, and Educated by Tara Westover. McConaghy's work is no stranger to the Amazon Editors. Her debut novel, Migrations, was named the Amazon Editors No. 1 Pick for the best fiction book in 2020. Upon learning that her novel was named the Best Book of the Year So Far, Charlotte McConaghy remarked, 'I'm so grateful for this honor. It moves me deeply to think of my novel making its way into the hands of readers, and for encouraging that I'd like to thank the wonderful editorial team at Amazon.' 'Selecting the Best Books of the Year So Far is a tireless—and fun—process for the Amazon Books Editors. Over thousands of hours, we read across genres from authors both new and established, searching for the very best books that make us smile, think, cry, cringe, and pique our sense of wonder,' said Sarah Gelman, editorial director, Amazon Books. 'Our top pick of the year so far, Wild Dark Shore, is a novel that masterfully evoked each of these emotions in our team, and beautifully highlights the imperfections of human nature even when we have the best intentions.' Below are the top 10 literary standouts of 2025 so far. To explore the complete Best Books of the Year So Far list, visit and check out the Amazon Book Review for in-depth reviews of the books on our list. Book enthusiasts can also join an Amazon Live conversation with Charlotte McConaghy, author of the No. 1 selection Wild Dark Shore, on Tuesday, June 10 at 4:30 p.m. ET. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy: 'Shot from a cannon in the dark, Wild Dark Shore is a novel that hooks you from the start and doesn't let you go until the last page; it will leave you breathless, wide-eyed, and in awe of the extraordinary power of fiction. McConaghy's exquisite gift is that she creates characters that you know you shouldn't trust with your whole heart, but you do anyway. The result is a gutting, magnificent story of the things people will do—or won't do—for the people and things they care about.' —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby: 'In King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby conjures up a prodigal son tale with a little of The Godfather in its DNA, but this is S.A. Cosby we're talking about, so it's both business and personal, with all the family secrets, hubris, conflicts, brotherly love, lethal betrayals, and retribution that involves. He's firing on all cylinders here and we couldn't be happier to be along for another great ride.' —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris: 'This exposé into one of America's most trusted companies is mind-blowing. Just as you'll be appalled by the villains, you'll also be inspired by the brave whistleblowers who put their careers, and possibly lives, on the line to bring truth to light. A must-read.' —Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong: ''Life is good when we do good things for each other.' This Dostoyevsky quote provides a powerful refrain for Vuong's moving sophomore novel. If he wasn't already referred to as 'the patron saint of the lonely,' this story would earn him that moniker.' —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Editor Sunrise on the Reaping (A Hunger Games Novel) by Suzanne Collins: ' Sunrise on the Reaping took me back to the thrill of reading The Hunger Games years ago. With the backstory of Haymitch Abernathy and the 50th Hunger Games, this action-packed popcorn read also has a dark kernel you'll chew on long after the shocking end.' —Seira Wilson, Amazon Editor The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley: 'This beautifully told novel about three teen moms in the Florida Panhandle is a banner example of what the best fiction can do: put us in other people's shoes, challenge our thinking, and expand our empathy.' —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Editor Memorial Days: A Memoir by Geraldine Brooks: 'Emotional, pragmatic, and filled with the keen observations of a literary luminary's broken heart, Geraldine Brooks' memoir is a euphoric love story, and a meditation on grief and curiosity…Incandescent and necessary.' —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor Dead Money by Jakob Kerr: 'So much fun. Set among Silicon Valley's tech bros, this twisty closed-door mystery follows Mackenzie as she races to solve a CEO's murder. Is she in over her head, or does she know more than she lets on? This is a one-sitting read that's slick, cynical, and surprising, with an absolutely delicious last line.' —Abby Abell, Amazon Editor Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid: 'This heart-wrenching and exhilarating journey to the cosmos masterfully captures both the thrill of space exploration and the complexities of human connection. Atmosphere is a testament to resilience and how far we'll go to chase our dreams, even when those dreams seem as distant as the stars.' —Kami Tei, Amazon Editor Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles: 'Come for Beyoncé, but—trust me—you'll stay for Tina. Tina Knowles is a force of a nature, which is why we devoured this memoir in one sitting, and discovered why it was almost inevitable that this driven, creative, and savvy businesswoman would raise two girls who would reshape American music—and culture.' —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor About Amazon Books Editors The Amazon Books Editors are a group of literary experts with extensive experience spanning publishing, journalism, and communications. They read thousands of books every year across genres to help customers discover their next favorite read, and put together Best Books of the Month, Best Books of the Year So Far, and Best Books of the Year lists on Amazon. To read Editor reviews, discover recommendations of new books in popular categories, and explore author interviews, visit the Amazon Book Review. You can also follow the Amazon Books Editors' recommendations and conversations @amazonbooks on Instagram and Facebook. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth's Best Employer, and Earth's Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit and follow @AmazonNews.
ABC News
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Charlotte McConaghy calls for climate change action in new novel Wild Dark Shore
Australian author Charlotte McConaghy's third novel, Wild Dark Shore, opens with a woman washing up on a remote island halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica. Who she is and why she's there is the mystery that propels the narrative. Claire Nichols, host of ABC Radio National's The Book Show, says it's a great read — but McConaghy found Wild Dark Shore her hardest novel to write. "I wrote the first 25,000 words four times and deleted them four times. I couldn't work out whose story it was, whose point of view it would be told in, what tense it would be in," she tells The Book Show. "It took a lot more planning than I'm used to doing … It needed to have a propulsive mystery storyline that would get you to want to turn the pages, but it also needed to have a depth of emotion and a sense of place that was vivid and compelling." It also took a research trip to a subantarctic island located halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, accessible only by a two-week ocean voyage, to remove McConaghy's writing block. "The story was falling short," she says. "I knew that I had to get to this island." Her plan worked: Wild Dark Shore quickly became a New York Times bestseller when it was published earlier this year. As Nichols writes in her review of the novel: "Once you pick this book up, it's going to be very hard to put it down." At first, the idea of travelling to Macquarie Island — a subantarctic island governed by Tasmania, located around 1,500 kilometres north of Antarctica — seemed impossible. "There's one boat that goes at one time of year, so I had to be on that boat, or it wouldn't be happening for me," McConaghy says. And there was another problem — she couldn't leave her 16-month-old baby behind. To her surprise, the travel company gave them both the green light to travel. McConaghy travelled to the southern tip of New Zealand, where she boarded the boat with her son, clad in a huge life vest. Once on board, she approached the staff member in charge. "She took one look at me and said, 'Oh God, we told them not to let you come,'" McConaghy recalls. "That was really, really scary. [It was] a terrible start to the journey." Fortunately, the seas were unusually calm, and they made it to Macquarie Island in one piece. The moment McConaghy arrived, she was greeted by "unbelievably dramatic landscape, mountainous, green and rich". And she knew she'd made the right decision. "I just remember being hit by a wall of sound. It was extraordinary. All the seabirds, millions of penguins, hundreds of seals, they're all around you, waddling up to say hello. It has this impossibly untouched feel; it's so wild," she says. But she sensed a darkness on the island, too. Dotting the landscape were large, rusting metal barrels, relics of the oil-extraction trade that began in the late 19th century, when penguins were killed and boiled down for their oil. "You can feel the blood spilt on this island and the terrible destruction of wildlife," McConaghy says. "It really affected me and made me realise that, in fact, this place is haunted." McConaghy's time on Macquarie Island gave her the inspiration for Wild Dark Shore's setting, an isolated outpost called Shearwater Island populated with a lighthouse, a few huts and an abandoned research station. Shearwater has become uninhabitable, under siege from rising sea levels and violent weather. "The beaches are crumbling away into the ocean," McConaghy says. It's also the site of a seed vault, which McConaghy modelled on the real-life Global Seed Vault in Svalbard in northern Norway. Built in the Arctic ice, the vault was designed to preserve 930,000 seeds from around the world from extinction. "The whole idea of this vault is that it should withstand anything and last well into the future. But the insane thing is that they did not predict the rise in temperatures that would lead to melting permafrost, and [in 2017] the vault flooded," McConaghy says. "They salvaged all the seeds — it was OK — but when I read about the story, it piqued my fascination. I was interested in the question of what we would choose to save if we had the chance." It's a question the island's last remaining residents, the Salt family — Dominic, a caretaker employed by Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, and his three children, Raff, Fen and Orly — must address head on. Tasked with overseeing the seed vault and its irreplaceable treasure, they must choose which seeds to save and which to sacrifice as the vault begins to flood. "They're in a race against time," McConaghy says. "The water is coming in through the walls, and they don't have anywhere to store all these precious things, so they have to make difficult decisions." Dom and his kids have lived in the lighthouse on Shearwater Island for eight years, since the death of his wife, Claire. "A big part of him fleeing to this isolated place is a way of coping with his grief — or escaping it really," McConaghy says. Raff, the eldest child, is beset by deep rage at losing his mother. His 17-year-old sister Fen has abandoned the lighthouse and now spends her days among the seals on the black sand beach, swimming with them in the ocean. "She's a wild creature," McConaghy says, acknowledging Fen's similarity to the selkies — creatures that shapeshift between human and seal form — of Celtic mythology. The youngest is Orly, a "precociously clever" nine-year-old. Passionate about the vault's mission, Orly brings to life the seeds' stories. "But he's also haunted, too; he hears the voices of all the creatures that have died on this island. He hears them in the wind," McConaghy says. Into this unusual situation arrives Rowan, the woman who Fen rescues from the ocean during a huge storm that knocks out the island's power supply. "The family are completely baffled by her arrival and cannot fathom how she's come to be there, unless perhaps she was on her way there, which is another mystery in itself, because no boats go there. Why would anyone show up to this place? The scientists are all gone," McConaghy says. "There's a lot of suspicion around why she's there and … she's not particularly up-front about it either. She's holding her cards very close initially, because … she has a mission that she's on, and she quickly discovers that this family are not being entirely truthful with her as well." It's a pacy novel with plenty of action scenes, aided by McConaghy's background in screenwriting. "You have to be extremely clear with screenwriting about what you're seeing, what's happening on screen, what the characters are doing," she says. "I like to make my internal emotional descriptions poetic and lyrical, but I like to keep the action simple." McConaghy's past three novels are set in wild locations under threat from climate change: the Arctic in Migrations (2020), the Alaskan wilderness in Once There Were Wolves (2021), and the subantarctic island of Wild Dark Shore. It's a pattern McConaghy suspects is borne from her desire to connect with nature. But she realised she couldn't write about the natural world without addressing climate change as well. "It opened up this whole very passionate venture for me, which is to try and render the beautiful wild creatures and spaces that we still have left and inspire people to treasure those things." In this way, her books can be interpreted as calls to action to address the climate crisis. "I'm hoping that people, first of all, feel moved, and then it would be incredible if they felt moved to action," McConaghy says. "We're at a crucial point in time right now, and it's very easy to feel overwhelmed by what's happening in the natural world with the climate catastrophe. "It's also easy to become apathetic because it's very difficult to know what to do, but sometimes intimate, human stories are the things that can make us feel the most and provide us with the most hope." Charlotte McConaghy is a guest at Sydney Writers Festival, which runs from May 20-25.
Boston Globe
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Local bestsellers for the week ended April 6
3. Abby Jimenez Forever 4. Knopf 5. Charlotte McConaghy Flatiron Books 6. Clare Leslie Hall Simon & Schuster 7. St. Martin's Press 8. Henry Holt and Co. 9. Grove Press 10. Colum McCann Random House HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Mel Robbins Hay House LL C 2. Scribner Advertisement 3. Crash Course Books Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 4. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster 5. Sarah Wynn-Williams Flatiron Books 6. Pantheon 7. Knopf 8. Elaine Pagels Doubleday 9. Riverhead Books 10. Maggie Smith Washington Square Press Advertisement PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Vintage 2. Grove Press 3. Daniel Mason Random House Trade Paperbacks 4. Harper Perennial 5. Vintage 6. Harper Perennial 7. Kaliane Bradley Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster 8. Catapult 9. Bonnie Garmus Vintage 10. Emily Henry Berkley PAPERBACK NONFICTION 1. Crown 2. Vintage 3. Matt Kracht Chronicle Book 4. Knopf 5. Milkweed Editions 6. Michael Finkel Vintage 7. Patrick Bringley Simon & Schuster 8. Timothy Snyder, Nora Krug (Illus.) Ten Speed Graphic 9. Vintage 10. Patrick Radden Keefe Vintage The New England Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NEIBA, for the week ended Sunday, April 6, 2025. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit Advertisement
Boston Globe
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Local bestsellers for the week ended March 23
3. Doubleday 4. Doubleday 5. Charlotte McConaghy Flatiron Books 6. Henry Holt and Co. 7. S&S/Saga Press 8. Anne Tyler Knopf 9. S&S/Summit Books 10. Clare Leslie Hall Simon & Schuster HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Crash Course Books 2. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster Advertisement 3. Mel Robbins Hay House LL C Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 4. Sarah Wynn-Williams Flatiron Books 5. Scribner 6. Michael Lewis (Ed.) Riverhead Books 7. Geraldine Brooks Viking 8. Amy Griffin The Dial Press 9. Knopf 10. Pantheon PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Vintage 2. Daniel Mason Random House Trade Paperbacks 3. Grove Press 4. Vintage 5. Harper Perennial 6. Scribner 7. Emily Henry Berkley 8. Catapult 9. Niall Williams Bloomsbury Publishing 10. Freida McFadden Grand Central PAPERBACK NONFICTION 1. Crown Advertisement 2. Vintage 3. Matt Kracht Chronicle Book 4. Vintage 5. Knopf 6. Milkweed Editions 7. Vintage 8. Patrick Radden Keefe Vintage 9. Patrick Bringley Simon & Schuster 10. Penguin The New England Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NEIBA, for the week ended Sunday, March 23, 2025. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit
Boston Globe
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Local bestsellers for the week ended March 16
3. Knopf 4. Charlotte McConaghy Flatiron Books 5. Knopf 6. Riverhead Books 7. Knopf 8. Henry Holt and Co. 9. Clare Leslie Hall Simon & Schuster 10. Doubleday HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Mel Robbins Hay House LL C 2. Scribner Advertisement 3. Pantheon 4. Sarah Wynn-Williams Flatiron Books Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 5. Geraldine Brooks Viking 6. Knopf 7. Peter Wolf Little, Brown and Company 8. Russell Shorto W.W. Norton & Company 9. Amy Griffin The Dial Press 10. Avery PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Vintage 2. Vintage 3. Daniel Mason Random House Trade Paperbacks 4. Emily Henry Berkley 5. Harper Perennial 6. Scribner 7. Catapult 8. Grove Press 9. Freida McFadden Grand Central 10. Helen Simonson Dial Press Trade Paperback PAPERBACK NONFICTION 1. Crown Advertisement 2. Vintage 3. Vintage 4. Knopf 5. Penguin 6. Milkweed Editions 7. Matt Kracht Chronicle Books 8. TarcherPerigee 9. Vintage 10. Patrick Bringley Simon & Schuster The New England Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NEIBA, for the week ended Sunday, March 16, 2025. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit
