The author describes the setting as a character in the book in her note at the end of this story, and I couldn't agree more. The fictional town in Antarctica lends so much atmosphere, depth, and also heartbreak to this incredible novel. It’s hauntingly beautiful and it mirrors the emotional landscape of the characters in ways that feel both intentional and unforgettable.

This book gutted me in the best way. It made me feel small and human and raw. Five stars.

Overview
Charlotte McConaghy’s upcoming novel is poised to be one of the most emotionally resonant literary releases of the year. Early descriptions point to a narrative that is profoundly affecting—gut-wrenching in the best possible sense—and crafted with the kind of lyrical precision and raw emotional depth that have become hallmarks of McConaghy’s writing. This novel promises to offer a searing exploration of loss, identity, and the endurance of the human spirit.

Emotional Resonance
This book is not simply a story—it is an emotional experience. Readers can expect to be immersed in a world that is both haunting and beautiful, one that leaves a lasting emotional imprint. The narrative reportedly evokes an intense and deeply personal response, making it especially impactful for readers drawn to stories that challenge and confront as much as they comfort. The emotional weight carried throughout the story is unflinching, making it a powerful and cathartic read.

Thematic Depth
McConaghy appears to once again delve into themes of grief, resilience, and the fragility of human connection. Her writing often explores how individuals respond to trauma, how they repair what’s broken, and how they find meaning in the aftermath of profound loss. This novel is expected to expand on those ideas, offering nuanced reflections on what it means to endure—and to heal—in the face of irreversible change.

Literary Style
Stylistically, the prose is expected to be lush and evocative, with McConaghy’s signature command of tone and atmosphere. Her ability to build emotionally complex characters and situate them within stark yet poetic settings creates a deeply immersive experience. Readers will likely find themselves lingering over passages, not only for the story’s content but for the sheer beauty of the language itself.

Anticipated Impact
This release is already generating early buzz in literary circles and among readers who gravitate toward emotionally driven fiction. It’s poised to be a standout addition to spring reading lists and a likely contender for critical acclaim. With its raw emotional honesty and literary elegance, the novel is expected to spark meaningful conversations and connect deeply with audiences around the world.

Final Thoughts
Charlotte McConaghy continues to solidify her place as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary fiction. Her forthcoming novel promises to be both devastating and luminous—a story that lingers long after the final page. For those who seek novels that challenge the heart and elevate the form, this will undoubtedly be an essential read.

Charlotte McConaghy is back again and gave me all the feels like her other books. The character development and storyline will keep you wanting more even when the story ends. Her descriptive ability to bring nature to life is a gift. This novel is truly amazing. Put at the top of your list! The audiobook is well done.

Thank you NetGalley & MacMillan Audio for this advanced audiobook.

I feel like I'm definitely an outlier with my opinion on this one, so take it with a grain of salt. Wild Dark Shore takes on the topic of climate change and the impacts on a remote island housing the world's seed stores. The story follows the Salt family, the caretakers of the island, and a woman, Rowan, who mysteriously washes ashore one day.

Though the book is very beautifully written and narrated, and although it tackles some interesting topics like grief, trauma, and an uncertain future due to climate change, I unfortunately felt like the bulk of the story was extremely dull and slow. It just didn't feel like much really happened in the story, other than the impending problem of the island disappearing. The mystery aspect of the story was really underwhelming and predictable for me. The children's characters were somewhat interesting, but I never felt connected to the adults or their stories.

Again, take this with a grain of salt because everyone else is loving it, but for me, this was tough to rate. I did think the writing was good, but the story itself was dull.

The author has such a way with words and emotions that makes this book just as special as her previous. From the beginning, I was hooked, and while the story progresses quickly, you learn a lot about past events and present events at the same time. One thing that I love about her books is that the settings are always in very remote places, often places that I know very little about so it’s like getting to learn as I read a really great story. The ending of this one really got me and I did expect it to end quite differently. My heart is still broken but I respect the author’s story. I would love to know the behind the scenes of this one and how she felt while writing it.

Give this one a try if you want a little bit of mystery that will rip your heart out.

WoW! This is one of the best books I have read in AGES! Amazing characters, amazing premise, the perfect balance of climate catastrophe and the beauty of living in the moment. DO NOT MISS!

Excellent performance. Thank you to Macmillan Audio and Netgalley for the ARC.

This book was so beautiful. The writing, the plot, the characters— I loved it all. With that being said, it isn’t for everyone. It was quite slow, but it worked for me.

The ending absolutely gutted me. I hear this author is just an incredible writer overall, which means I need to read more from her.

This book had such an incredible message.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Thank you to publisher and author for this ALC.

🐚𝙷𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚢 𝙿𝚞𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝙳𝚊𝚢 𝚝𝚘 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚍 𝙳𝚊𝚛𝚔 𝚂𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚋𝚢 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚎 𝙼𝚌𝙲𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚐𝚑𝚢🐋

•Character Driven
•Lyrical Prose
•Breathtaking ode to natural world
•Hauntingly captivating
•Deliberately dream-like
•And as all McConaghy novels are, deeply insightful!!!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

One of my favorite authors of all time has done it again!!!!

In Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel, Wild Dark Shore, the story begins with striking imagery as a woman named Rowan washes ashore on Shearwater, a secluded island off the Antarctic coast after a shipwreck. She is cared for by the island’s few remaining inhabitants — Dominic Salt and his children, Raff, Fen, and Orly — who are the last survivors of a long-abandoned research station and seed bank. However, Rowan’s unexpected arrival disrupts the delicate balance of the Salt family, already strained by personal and professional crises and the weight of ongoing grief.

Dominic, his family, and the vital seeds they’ve been protecting for the past eight years are supposed to be picked up by ship in six weeks, but with their radio destroyed, there’s no way to accelerate their departure. As Rowan’s physical wounds heal, she follows her own secretive mission that brought her to Shearwater, all the while becoming involved in the Salts’ growing struggle to safeguard the precious seed vault and the biodiversity it holds.

This is a book to SAVOR. I hope you all will love it as much as I did!! Be sure to run to your local bookstore and grab a copy today!! I’ll be reading Broken Country next which is also published today!!

P.S. If you haven’t read any of her work, I highly recommend picking up Once There Were Wolves and Migrations!!! All her books are standalone’s but I feel as though Once There Were Wolves is a good book to start with if you want to familiarize yourself with her writing style!

This was okay. Many of the characters felt one dimensional and the plot wasn’t quite as mysterious as I’d hoped it to be. I also don’t think the dystopian element really sold itself.

Thanks to Libro.fm and NetGalley for the ALC!

Wow.... This book is so beautiful. Charlotte McConaghy is so amazing at writing atmospheric novels that make you think and this is no exception. The character growth really stands out in this book and the ending was so moving. What a great read!

This was my first novel by McConaghy and it won't be my last. This book was so atmospheric and lyrical, I was drawn from the very first line. The story follows multiple points of view of people inhabiting an island off the coast of Australia; a fictional island with the world's largest seed vault (think: the seed vault on Svalbard). I would call this literary fiction, but also climate fiction, in which one of the main themes of this story is the impeding climate disaster of the island eroding into the ocean, where the seeds will be lost at sea. Some flora wiped entirely from existence. This is a story of survival, grief, love, and finding your purpose, all with an eerie backdrop of an untamable, doomed island, and those who love it. I read the audiobook, thanks to NetGalley, and highly recommend it. Thank you to the author and publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this novel. I cannot wait to read more from this author. 5/5 stars!

<i> A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together. </i>

Wild Dark Shore is a beautifully written story. I felt slightly removed from the characters, and thus not able to connect as deeply with the story as I’d hoped, but it was still a worthwhile read.

Cooper Mortlock, Katherine Littrel, Saskia Maarleveld, and Steve West did an excellent job narrating the audiobook.

Thank you Charlotte McConagh, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for providing this ARC for review consideration. All opinions expressed are my own.

We shared this on an episode of our podcast and gave it nothing but 5 stars! Beautiful and haunting.

I loved Charlotte McConaghy’s first two novels, so Wild Dark Shore was one of my most highly anticipated books of 2025. This year, my reading has unfortunately taken a backseat to other things in my life, so despite receiving a galley audiobook at the start of the year (thank you Macmillan Audio!), I didn’t manage to listen to it until two months after its release. But in that time, I’ve observed with pleasure how McConaghy has appeared to gain real traction on bookstagram — my expectations heightened as I realized Wild Dark Shore appeared to be the author’s most popular book yet.

Wild Dark Shore includes a number of the same elements that I loved in McConaghy’s Migrations and Once There Were Wolves. Her eco-fiction is set in the near future, highlighting imminent climate volatility and environmental risk. Her books fuse literary fiction with genre writing, a refreshing combination that has the effect of making her books page turners. And McConaghy’s nature writing is always vivid and sparks my curiosity about the natural world.

A couple chapters in, I was fully enjoying Wild Dark Shore. I was invested in the main character’s initial shipwreck. I loved the setting of an Antarctic island housing one of the world’s seed banks, and the premise of a family tasked with safeguarding it. But around the 1/3 mark, my experience started to tank.

Wild Dark Shore contains more narrators and more soap-opera-esque plot twists than McConaghy’s prior novels, and ultimately I feel like she tried to cram too much into one story. This likely contributed to my failure to connect with the two main protagonists and my feeling that certain key plot and character developments were not emotionally credible.

However, what bothered me the most was Wild Dark Shore’s portrayal of motherhood and a mother’s sacrifice as a woman’s highest purpose. Maybe my bias as a child-free woman in JD Vance’s America is coloring my reaction to this book (because in large part the U.S. relies on women’s sacrifice instead of providing its citizens with a social safety net), but FFS, I think women have sacrificed enough. Instead, I would love to consume media emphasizing women’s ambitions or women setting healthy boundaries. It’s interesting because a couple of bookstagrammers have commented that Once There Wolves’ contained even more heavy handed messaging on motherhood than WDS, and I simply don’t recall registering that. I may have to revisit.

Even though I found McConaghy’s third book deeply disappointing, I did appreciate that (similar to Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You), Wild Dark Shore grapples with the very relevant question of how to raise children in a deeply unsettled world (something I think about a lot). Notwithstanding my critical review, I am looking forward to McConaghy’s next novel.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge that the audiobook narrators did a terrific job— especially Steve West as Dominic Salt. Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the audiobook galley!

Wild Dark Shore is a hauntingly beautiful read that pulled me in from the first page. The atmosphere is rich and eerie, with a coastal setting that feels alive and full of secrets. I connected deeply with the characters, especially as their emotional layers slowly unfolded. Perfect for readers who love gothic suspense with a literary edge—I couldn’t put it down.

Multiple narratives do a phenomenal job of bringing this audiobook to life and making it unputdownable. I liked that each character had their own narrator. A father and his three children are living by themselves on a remote island close to Antarctica when a strange woman washes ashore and integrates herself into their lives. The mysterious circumstances of her arrival come into question and the family must come together to face demons both past and present, some of which prove to be destructive.

This is a mystery/suspense, as well as a fascinating character study, with the main character actually being the remote, inhospitable island. The descriptions of the climate and landscape drew me in and captivated me. Each of the human characters brings their own perspective and flaws, creating a tension, the cause of which simmers until the end when all is revealed. This is a unique and profoundly deep story that will appeal to a wide array of readers.

This book started off strong for me with the mystery and background information. Then I felt like some of the characters were not needed to tell the story, and I got lost with the goal of the book.

Having read "Once There Were Wolves" by Charlotte McConaghy, I was very excited to receive this ARC. I enjoyed OTWW a bit more than this one, but also liked this book. There were some predictable areas and I didn't care for the ending, but I understand why the author wrote it this way. She is a great character builder and makes you genuinely care about the story she's telling and people she's writing.

Mysterious, engaging, and emotionally complex. I don't often listen to novels because I find it difficult to keep up with the story if I zone out for a second. I did NOT have that problem with this book. I was engaged the whole time and I LOVED having the full cast of narrators. This was my first book by this author, but I will be adding her to my auto-read list.

Thank you to NetGalley & Macmillan Audio for a review copy of this book

Another Favourite by this author, I can not wait to revisit this book a little later this year. I found the story to be captivating from the first sentence