Latest news with #WildDarkShore
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.
Los Angeles Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, May 4
1. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley: $29) Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of an heiress. 2. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 3. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron Books: $29) As sea levels rise, a family on a remote island rescues a mysterious woman. 4. Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books: $28) An accomplished actor grapples with the varied roles she plays in her personal life. 5. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead Books: $30) Worlds collide when a teenager vanishes from her Adirondacks summer camp. 6. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon: $29) A woman fights for freedom in a near-future where even dreams are under surveillance. 7. Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (Simon & Schuster: $29) A love triangle unearths dangerous secrets. 8. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $29) Two grieving brothers come to terms with their history. 9. The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Henry Holt & Co.: $29) An unexpected wedding guest gets surprise help. 10. Strangers in Time by David Baldacci (Grand Central Publishing: $30) Two London teens scarred by World War II find an unexpected ally in a bereaved bookshop owner. … 1. Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf: $32) Diary entries from the famed writer's journal. 2. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A call to renew a politics of plenty and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. 3. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 4. Fahrenheit-182 by Mark Hoppus and Dan Ozzi (Dey Street Books: $33) A memoir from the vocalist, bassist and founding member of pop-punk band Blink-182. 5. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 6. Everything Is Tuberculosis (signed edition) by John Green (Crash Course Books: $28). The deeply human story of the fight against the world's deadliest infectious disease. 7. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf: $28) Reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. 8. When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter (Penguin Press: $32) The former Vanity Fair editor recalls the glamorous heyday of print magazines. 9. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron Books: $33) An insider's account of working at Facebook. 10. Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (Pantheon: $27) A meditation on freedom, trust, loss and our relationship with the natural world. … 1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 2. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Vintage: $18) 3. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press: $17) 4. Table for Two by Amor Towles (Penguin Books: $19) 5. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (Anchor: $18) 6. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 7. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $19) 8. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $18) 9. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage: $19) 10. The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $19) … 1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 3. Sociopath by Patric Gagne (Simon & Schuster: $20) 4. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17) 5. Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (Picador: $18) 6. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 7. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Vintage: $18) 8. Eve by Cat Bohannon (Vintage: $20) 9. There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $20) 10. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $36)
New York Times
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
24 Works of Fiction to Read This Spring
Dream Count More than a decade has passed since Adichie's award-winning novel 'Americanah.' Now, the author returns with the stories of four African women, intertwined by blood or friendship, who grapple with love and grief, identity and belonging, and the pressures of community and their own desires — all set against the backdrop of the pandemic. Wild Dark Shore Dominic Salt, a widowed father, and his three children live on Shearwater, a remote island between the Tasmania and Antarctica. When a devastating storm strikes, an injured woman washes ashore. Who is she? Where did she come from? And what, exactly, does she want? Fan Service Devin is a washed-up actor who's trying to interest producers in a reboot of the werewolf soap opera that made him famous as a teen. When his own life begins to mirror that of his character, Devin seeks the help of Alex, who used to moderate his online fan forum — if she can put aside her disdain for him in order to figure out what's happened to him. The Jackal's Mistress In 1860s Virginia, Libby, the wife of a Confederate soldier away at war, faces a difficult choice when a critically injured Union officer shows up next door. Despite the risk, she tries to help him in hopes that a stranger would do the same for her husband. Sunrise on the Reaping Taking place 24 years before the events of the first book, this prequel begins the morning of the reaping for the 50th Hunger Games. For the occasion, twice as many tributes are selected from each district. Among them is Haymitch Abernathy — the eventual champion and future mentor of the heroine Katniss Everdeen — who, despite all odds, must win the deadly battle royale. The Love We Found Nearly 10 years have passed since Gabe died in Santopolo's 'The Light We Lost.' His lover, Lucy, is still reeling from the loss when she finds a tiny piece of paper tucked in a box of his old photos. It leads her to an address in Rome, where she meets a doctor from New York. Can a new flame help her move on? Tilt Annie's life is upended when a devastating earthquake hits Portland, Ore. The disaster nearly kills Annie, who is nine months pregnant, and separates her from her husband. Walking past the wreckage of suburban sprawl, Annie reflects on her disappointing career, memories of her dead mother and her struggling marriage. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter The discovery of a century-old diary begins Jones's latest horror novel, which tells the tale of Good Stab, a Native man who transformed into a vampire after a brutal massacre of Indigenous people. Armed with his newfound powers, he embarks on a vengeful quest. Rabbit Moon When a hit-and-run accident leaves their daughter Lindsey critically injured in China — where she is teaching English during her college gap year — her divorced parents come together for the first time since they separated, bringing old grievances to the fore. Flesh István leads a solitary life with his mother in a Hungarian town. His only other companion is his neighbor, an older married woman with whom he becomes involved in a complicated relationship. Their entanglement results in a violent accident that reverberates throughout his life. Flirting Lessons Avery, newly single, is excited to dive back into the dating world — women, this time. She, however, has little to no experience dating people of the same sex. That's where Taylor, a notorious modern-day Casanova, comes in, giving Avery the lessons she needs on flirting and, ultimately, love. My Documents The lives of four young adult cousins of Vietnamese descent are turned upside down when a series of terrorist bombings on American soil ignites a national panic. The attacks prompt the government to issue an order directing Vietnamese Americans, including two of the four cousins and their mothers, to internment camps. Audition A middle-aged actress forms an ambiguous relationship with a younger man before a monumental shift halfway through the book. Are they lovers, co-workers or family members — who's to say? Fish Tales Drugs, sex and parties abound in this novel, which was Toni Morrison's last acquisition as an editor and originally published in 1983. Lewis Jones, a young Black woman, bounces between Detroit and New York, drifting through relationships and seeking a freedom that constantly eludes her. Vanishing World In this dystopian novel, sex between married couples is as taboo as incest, and society is populated by artificial insemination. As a child, Amane learns she was conceived the old-fashioned way. This discovery kindles a lifelong conflict between her desire to conform to society's expectations — or pursue what she actually wants. Great Big Beautiful Life Alice and Hayden, both writers, are hired to spend a month on an island to compete for the chance to write the exclusive biography of Margaret Ives, a former tabloid princess turned reclusive octogenarian. But what begins as a friendly rivalry soon turns into something far more intense. The Staircase in the Woods Five high school students on a camping trip discover a mysterious staircase leading nowhere. When one friend climbs up and vanishes, the staircase disappears. Twenty years later, the staircase reappears, prompting the group to reunite, return to the woods and find their lost friend. My Name Is Emilia del Valle Allende's latest follows Emilia, a woman born in 1860s San Francisco to an Irish nun and a Chilean aristocrat, who grows up to be an independent, self-sufficient journalist. When an opportunity arises to cover a civil war in Chile with another reporter, Emilia must confront her desires, her estranged relationship with her father and the violence brewing in his country. The Emperor of Gladness This new novel by the author 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' traces the profound relationship between a Vietnamese man and a widow in a fictional Connecticut town. Hai, the young man, is about to leap into a river when he is stopped by the sound of a woman wailing. Hai becomes the caretaker for the widowed woman, Grazina, who is grappling with dementia, and whose struggles help him choose another path. Sleep Margaret, a recently divorced mother of two daughters, has yet to confront some ugly truths from her childhood. As one of her daughters approaches the age Margaret was when she faced her dark adolescent chapter, Margaret balances her past with her roles as a mother and a daughter. Heart, Be at Peace Told in interconnecting stories, this book paints a gentle portrait of a small Irish village recovering from economic collapse. Hope has returned to the town with new jobs and a sense of peace, but beneath the surface, old grudges and new threats stir. Spent In this new graphic work of autofiction, Bechdel, the author of 'Fun Home,' channels her existential dread through a character named Alison, a cartoonist in charge of a pygmy goat sanctuary who's living in a world ravaged by climate change and a country on the brink of civil war. Harmattan Season Boubacar, a veteran private eye, just wants peace. But Boubacar finds himself plunged into the shadows of a city teetering on violence after a bleeding woman arrives at his door and disappears just as suddenly. As tensions rise, Boubacar must confront his past and decide how much he's willing to sacrifice. The South After his grandfather's death, Jay travels to a deteriorating farm that his family inherited. As decay overtakes the property, Jay becomes enthralled with Chuan, the son of the farm's manager. Their connection deepens amid the tense family dynamics inside the house, where secrets and regrets begin to surface.
Washington Post
07-03-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
‘Wild Dark Shore' is a captivating novel set in a very remote place
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
New York Times
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Island Family Faces Rising Waters and an Unexpected Guest
Charlotte McConaghy's third novel, 'Wild Dark Shore,' opens vividly, with a shipwrecked woman named Rowan washing up on Shearwater, a remote island off the coast of Antarctica. She is nursed to health by the island's caretakers — Dominic Salt and his children, Raff, Fen and Orly, the last inhabitants of an abandoned research base and seed bank — but her unexplained arrival soon upsets the Salt family's delicate balance, which is already strained by grief amid a series of personal and professional disasters. Dominic, his family and the precious seeds they have been safeguarding for the past eight years are meant to be retrieved by ship six weeks after Rowan's arrival, a timeline they're unable to accelerate after their radio is destroyed. As her injuries heal, Rowan pursues the secret agenda that brought her to Shearwater, while also joining the Salts in their increasingly desperate bid to secure the seed vault and the botanical diversity it preserves. Fierce cold and wind are a constant threat, and the sea is rising so quickly that Shearwater's beaches are collapsing, endangering the native seals and penguins as well as the base's buildings. (Also, there might be ghosts.) It's a rare novel that has so many simultaneous sources of trouble, and it's to McConaghy's credit that her plot's many interlocking escalations only rarely seem forced. But even when the action veers toward the melodramatic, it feels fitting enough: Should we be surprised when a tale about family bonds and doomed love at the end of the world occasionally becomes a melodrama? In her author's note, McConaghy recounts visiting the real-life Australian research base on Macquarie Island, a place she calls 'surely one of the most precious in the world.' Even as she borrowed its details for her Shearwater, McConaghy says her experience on Macquarie obligated her to render 'the truth of the island's rich flora, its extraordinary wildlife and its unique climate.' Indeed, 'Wild Dark Shore' abounds with evocative nature writing, including precocious Orly's moving monologues about the dandelion, the buzzy burr, the dinosaur tree and other model specimens of natural resilience. At 9, Orly has lived nearly his entire life on Shearwater; whatever future comes for the Salts and the imperiled wider world they'll soon rejoin, it's young Orly who may live to see the worst of it. Perhaps his Antarctic childhood will help him withstand the inexorable losses to come. Perhaps he'll have to remake himself in the face of grief as Rowan and his father and siblings already have. If so, he may be buoyed by his many examples of nature's perseverance, like his beloved mangrove seeds that transform as they migrate, seeking an environment where they might thrive: 'Will you change shape and put down roots?' Orly asks. 'Or carry on in search of somewhere better?' The Salts and Rowan cannot hope to stay on Shearwater, but where should they go, and with whom? As the climate crisis accelerates, the assurance of loss may make retreat ever more attractive, even if it costs us connection with the human and nonhuman worlds we've loved. In 'Wild Dark Shore,' we're shown why a person might withdraw from the messiness of life after tragedy and trauma: 'It's not a good idea to fall in love,' Rowan warns Fen, 'not with people and not with places.' 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. As Rowan reflects later in the novel: 'What is the use of safety if it deprives you of everything else?'
