Note: This book review contains spoilers!
Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore explores the porousness between life and death, and the wearying responsibility of stewarding the living through the buffeting dangers of the world while they are here. McConaghy makes the point that we are capable — perhaps hardwired — to perform extreme acts of self-sacrifice to ensure the survival of our loved ones, but also asks haunting questions about what it means to be sending our children into an uncertain world, imperiled as it is by climate calamities and other lurking evils. The book asks: “What future is worth surviving for?” This motif is carried out at its most literal in the Salt family’s mission to preserve seeds in the event of global destruction. The Salts huddle around the responsibility of safeguarding them, and when they discover that not all seeds can be saved, they must decide which to protect, and which to let go. The rubric for this decision-making is unclear: Do we save the ones most likely to thrive and nourish? Do we protect the rarest of the lot, the ones most likely never to come back? Or do we permit our own imperfect hearts to make the call, favoring those whose features move us? This is, of course, incalculable math, and McConaghy looks roughly and then gently at all parts of the equation.
On Shearwater Island, the dead and the living co-mingle uncomfortably, haunting and reassuring one another in interesting ways. Dom speaks to his dead wife; Rowan is haunted by memories of her brother, River; and Orly communes with the dead creatures on the island. It becomes clear that we can hold onto the people we love even after they are gone — we can carry them with us, speak to them — a truth both comforting and challenging. On the island, we have recently-buried bodies, the voices of the dead, the dark image of happily-living seals and penguins wandering around enormous tubs once used to hold penguins and seals when traders plundered the island. We also have the voices of two deceased characters (Alex and Dom’s wife) occasionally present themselves in the prose, as speakers in different chapters: in these cases, the dead are quite literally speaking among the living. And, in the end, we learn that Rowan’s narrations have always been posthumous, as she dies protecting her “adoptive” son in a final climactic moment. The narrative seems to transcend itself here, performing its own function as a way of uniting people around loss. The text, McConaghy suggests, can hold the entire spectrum of the living and the dead together. In this way, it performs a powerful social function.
I was astounded by McConaghy’s agile toggling between metaphor and plot. You can absolutely read the book as a pulsing thriller, with fabulous cliff-hangers and danger lurking at every turn, but you can also read much of the novel as allegory: what do we do at the end of the world? Her word choice in every line is careful and poetic. I love especially the word “shore” — the liminal, evolving space between land and water. It shrinks in tide; it is continuously falling into the water body adjacent. But it can also be a reprieve, firm ground. This is as perfect an avatar for the feeling of this novel as you can imagine: are we on terra firma, or is the sand disappearing beneath us grain by grain?
There were many vignettes in this novel that lingered, resonant with meaning, for me. I was particularly moved by the description of the whale who lost her baby, and the way that other whales swam to her, retrieved the carcass, and surrounded her in her grief. This happens in our species as well, of course: we huddle around the grieving even when we can do nothing to bring the lost back. This, too, McConaghy points out, is a way of surviving: leaning into the warmth and empathy of others. The other scene that continues to return to my mind’s eye each time I think of the novel: the moment when Dom, his children, and Row have just enjoyed an elaborate and rare feast, and are dancing on the shore. Disaster looms imminent, but they make of their bodies “a language of joy.” This felt like an important cipher for the book: even while standing at the edge of the world, facing unknown peril and likely ending, we can rejoice by forming impermanent connections with one another. We can move together. I saw this motif also in the improvisational poetry of Row joining Dom’s family for a portion of the novel, stepping in as a mother figure. Mitosis, fusion: temporary shapes cluster around one another, then split off.
The book echoes elsewhere in many ways. On a narrative level, there are many repetitions of similar acts of preservation in the face of catastrophe: mother wombats protecting their young from fire by shuffling them underground and then barring the burrow with their bodies; trees whose pods only open in extreme heat; mothers who give their lives delivering their babies; and so on. On a language level, McConaghy has a knack for the onomatopoeic, or the autological: words that sound like what they describe, or perform meaning in creative ways. For example, “Shearwater” — you can almost feel the sluicing of the place, its hidden blade, in the very name of the novel’s central setting. This is a place of dangerous water. Most of the characters have mono-syllabic, staccato names that puncture the text: Claire, Fen, Row, Dom, Raff. I came to see these blunt namings as a morse code for life, and living.
All in all, I absolutely loved the artistry of this book, its deft conjuring of place, and its wide-eyed grappling with sweeping questions around what we owe one another, what we owe the future, and what we owe the dead. I consider it one of the best books I’ve read in 2025 and cannot wait to hear your thoughts, critiques, and insights in the comments.
Wild Dark Shore Moodboards.
Wild Dark Shore Book Club Questions.
In case you are hosting an in-person club, or want to do some guided reflecting on the work, I put together a couple of questions below. Feel free to jump into some or any of these in the comments, too!
01. Why do you think WDS alternated between narrators? What effect did this have on the plot?
02. Did you read the word “shore” (from the title) as I did, as an avatar for the overarching feeling of the book? What do you think is “The Wild Dark Shore”? Why would McConaghy anchor us in that language, or that image?
03. What did you make of the voices of the wind, and the dead, in this book? They are accepted without narrative friction; Dom hears his wife, and it is represented as actual conversation.
04. The island is both dangerous to and beloved by the Salt family — especially Fen and Dom. What did you make of their connection to the island? How is Shearwater treated in the novel — as a setting, as a plot catalyst, as…? (What else is it?)
05. Let’s talk about Raff and his music — violin and whale song. How does this shape or reflect the text? (At one point, Raff “trades” his punching bag for his musical instruments. Are they substitutes for one another in some way? Why or why not?)
06. So many of the characters are complex and empathetic, but Hank is portrayed as greedy and self-preserving, with limited positive attributes. What did you make of his character?
07. We witness several climate catastrophes in the novel: fire, flood, storm, thaw. What portrait does McConaghy paint of nature, and its future?
08. How would categorize Wild Dark Shore in terms of genre?
Book Club Fare for Wild Dark Shore.
Are you hosting an in-person gathering for this book? This was always one of my favorite parts of my in-person book club in Chicago: designing a themed menu. I like the idea of putting out a spread of tinned fishes with crackers and hard cheese. My cousin-in-law takes people on expeditions to Antartica (!!! — her business is called Quixote Expeditions if you’re interested; tell her I sent ya!) and this is the kind of snack they might offer, as items are shelf stable for some time. If you want something more robust, this is the perfect occasion for a seafood plateau — oysters, shrimp, clams. If you’re feeling super splurgey, crab claws or lobster! And of course all the accoutrements: mignonette, cocktail sauce, lemon wedges, maybe a mustard sauce for the crab claws, or drawn butter.
On the beverage front, I asked myself: “what cocktail brings to mind the maritime — the cold, the salty, the oceanic?” If you’re an advanced cocktailer, you might try Punchdrink’s Sailor’s Paradise, which involves pickled melon brine (!) and suggests an oyster for garnish.
If you’re after something lower-key (I love a built cocktail for parties), let me suggest a perfect Gin and Tonic, and we’ll call it “The Shearwater G&T.” It’s crisp, it’s brisk, the tonic is medicinal–and gin always reminds me of the navy.
The Shearwater G&T.
2 oz Monkey 47 Gin
2 oz fever tree tonic
For garnish: Lime wedge, juniper berry
Fill a collins glass with ice. Add gin, then tonic. Squeeze a lime wedge into glass and add the wedge to the glass, too. Crush juniper berries using a mortar and pestle and add to gin glass.
A Wild Dark Shore Moody Playlist.
This text is so rich, the setting so atmospheric: the novel gave me instant ideas about a playlist to match. This may not be ideal for an actual book club — a little too slow/heavy for a social event? For that occasion, I’d recommend my dinner party playlist. But if you want to be in all of your feelings while reading and crying to this book, you might give this one a listen. (On Apple here, on Spotify here.) This is a moody mix of sea songs, ballads about endings, and voices that strum the heart. “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” felt just right for Rowan and her grief over the fire.
WDS Dream Casting.
I hope this book is adapted to screen — the plot is wild and thrilling, and the setting visually evocative. I know Dom is probably fair-haired like his children, but I imagined a dark and swarthy hero — someone with the quiet strength of Tom Hardy but maybe more wiriness and communicability? I don’t know, but he looks in my mind’s eye like a blend of these random handsome fishermen I found on Pinterest:
For Rowan: Daisy Edgar Jones! I couldn’t get her out of my head for this character. Or maybe someone like Riley Keough?
Who else do you think might be a good cast for a film adaptation?
Next Month’s Magpie Book Club Pick: Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
Next month’s book club pick is Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a Booker Prize winner. Description: “A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space…Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.” A completely different look at planet earth than the one offered by McConaghy, but seeming to pluck on similar strings–I thought this would be interesting to read in conversation with Wild Dark Shore, and I’m also interested in the prominence of space books right now — Taylor Jenkins Reid’s latest, Atmosphere, is also focused on astronauts.
Beyond that, a Magpie reader compelling described Orbital as her top book of 2024, adding “I never would have thought I’d like a book about astronauts in a space station orbiting the earth but boy does it capture the bigness and smallness of living. The prose is so good, meditative, subtle and the imagery vividly transports you to the foreign world of an orbiting space station. I found just the premise of being able to imagine myself falling through space had a profound effect on the experience of reading the book.” Ad lunam!
Sign Up for Magpie Book Club Emails.
This morning, I sent a special edition newsletter to book club email subscribers; you can sign up here! (If you already subscribe to my newsletter, you received this as well!) I will be sending out a once or twice a month newsletter to the book club list!
P.S. More recent book reviews here and here.
P.P.S. No one is paying as much attention to your life as you are, so you might as well…!
P.P.P.S. The plum you’ll eat next summer is waiting for you.
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