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Wild Dark Shore

Wild Dark Shore

A Novel
Literary FictionThriller
Pages
320
Published
2025
Language
English

Synopsis

Shearwater Island is the last place on Earth you'd wash up by accident: a remote, wind-scoured research station near Antarctica, home to a vault holding millions of the world's seeds against catastrophe. Its only inhabitants are Dominic Salt, the caretaker, and his three children—Raff, Fen, and young Orly—preparing to evacuate as the rising sea closes in. Then a woman named Rowan is pulled, half-drowned, from the water.

Rowan doesn't fully explain how she came to be shipwrecked here, and the Salts have secrets of their own. As storms batter the island and the vault, paranoia and attraction grow in equal measure, and everyone must decide who to trust with their lives. Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore is an atmospheric, propulsive climate thriller about isolation, grief, family, and the fragile faith we place in one another and in the natural world.

Prose complexity
7/10

Vibe

AtmosphericTenseMelancholicReflectiveMysterious
Survival

Genres

Literary Fiction Thriller Contemporary Literature Mystery

About the author

C
Charlotte McConaghy

Charlotte McConaghy is an Australian novelist and screenwriter, born in 1988 in Darwin, Northern Territory. She holds a master's degree in screenwriting from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. She began her career writing speculative fiction for young readers, including the Strangers of Paragor and Chronicles of Kaya series, before turning to adult literary fiction with Migrations (2020). Her subsequent novels, Once There Were Wolves (2021) and Wild Dark Shore (2025), are New York...

Characters

Dominic SaltProtagonist

The island's caretaker and a widowed father of three, tending Shearwater's seed vault as rising seas force an evacuation.

Rowan (Wild Dark Shore)Protagonist

A woman pulled half-drowned from a shipwreck onto Shearwater; her own losses, including a home destroyed by wildfire, and the secrets she withholds drive the novel's central tension.

OrlySupporting

Dominic's nine-year-old youngest child, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the seed vault and the plants it protects.

Fen (Wild Dark Shore)Supporting

Dominic's seventeen-year-old daughter, fiercely independent, who sleeps apart from the family near the island's seal colony and is the first to find Rowan.

Raff (Wild Dark Shore)Supporting

Dominic's eighteen-year-old son, a gifted musician who records the island's whale song and is quietly mourning a lost love.

All characters in Wild Dark Shore

Frequently asked questions

  • Is Shearwater Island a real place?

    No. Shearwater Island is fictional, though Charlotte McConaghy has drawn on Macquarie Island, a real sub-Antarctic island she has visited, as inspiration for its remote, storm-battered setting between Tasmania and Antarctica.

  • Has Wild Dark Shore won any awards?

    Yes. It won both Book of the Year and the Fiction category at Australia's 2026 Indie Book Awards. It was also longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2026 Stella Prize, and is a New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club pick.

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