NIKKI BYRD — writer, thinker, lover

Note: This content was written entirely by me and was not generated, edited, or researched using AI.

‘Wild Dark Shore’ (2025) by Charlotte McConaghy – BOOK REVIEW

Picture this: it’s a cold day, and there’s a winter storm brewing outside — all you desire is a burning fire and fuzzy socks while drinking hot tea. And still you think, ‘what’s missing?’ Behold, “Wild Dark Shore,” by Charlotte McConaghy, is the perfect page-turner for any cozy season. Shearwater, a fictional subantarctic island home to penguins, seals, albatrosses, and petrels, immerses readers within the perils of its nature.

This novel explores relationships cultivated in isolation, both in adolescence and adulthood, with the remote island of Shearwater center stage for a family of four that’s steeped in its haunted, majestic atmosphere for 9 years.

When Dominic Salt isn’t mulling over his daughter’s strange ritual of sleeping among the seals on the beach or coaching his oldest son through fits of boyhood angst and rage, he humors his youngest son with an intentional playfulness that in reality has escaped them all. Entertained by a stack of books read over a dozen times, downloaded movies, and inconsistent virtual schooling, the Salt family is busy with the constant responsibilities of survival, heeded by the limited resources brought to them by boat every six months.

More important than their survival is the care and maintenance of the last global seed vault known to man, endangered by rising sea levels and extreme weather on Shearwater Island.

“Most of what I do with my days is repair things that are gonna break again soon. I just fix them and then when they break I fix them again. It’s like pushing shit up a hill.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Because someone has to, or everything just stays broken.”

Along with his three children—Orly, 9, Fen, 17, and Raff, 18— they exist in a state of crippling stagnation.  Due to their lonely and undiluted disposition, the haunting beauty of the untouched nature surrounding them overwhelms their emotional and spiritual well-being, as they converse with their ghosts, strangled by their traumas.

“There is a place that pain takes you. I haven’t known this place before. That is a privilege.”

Until a woman washes on the shore.

Told from multiple perspectives, the Salt family, who move fluidly among the dilapidation and risks of Shearwater’s volatility, wonder, befuddled and dubious, about the mysterious, unconscious woman who seemed to appear from the ocean’s fathoms. In this novel, humans living among this explicit, unfettered ecosystem of wild fauna, inviolate and deeply revered, and blustering, merciless windstorms explore the fine line between the beauty of life and the brutality of death.

McConaghy dares to initiate the reader as a member of the Salt family, with prose that whispers in the Shearwater winds, secrets and lore of each character swimming between the pages with pain and longing for connection. Enjoy this novel if not for the atmosphere, then for the unraveling of truths, of souls unbridled among the elements and the curious seedbed and strain of isolation.

“I think I finally understand your words. It’s just a body. They hold on, or they don’t. You’re right, it’s nothing to be frightened of. Mine will become the salt of this water. And every time you swim it will be me upon your skin.”

★★★★★

SYNOPSIS

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. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all 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.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears. [Read More and Buy Now]