Wild Dark Shore
REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB'S BOOK OF THE YEAR • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (NPR, TIME, USA Today, The Economist, Scientific American, Good Housekeeping, Reader's Digest,BuzzFeed, BookRiot, HuffPost, Jezebel, The Globe and Mail, Kirkus, and more!)
"A breathtaking novel of ROMANCE, MYSTERY, AND TWISTS that will shock you...I love this book so much." —Reese Witherspoon
"A WILDLY TALENTED writer." ―Emily St. John Mandel
“Absolutely ASTONISHING. McConaghy's writing knocks me over every time.” —Fredrik Backman
“SPELLBINDING...Exceptionally imagined, thoroughly humane.” —Washington Post
"My absolute FAVORITE book of 2025." —Carley Fortune
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.
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Readers say *Wild Dark Shore* is a beautifully written, atmospheric eco-thriller set on the remote island of Shearwater, rich in marine life and secre...
Holy FLIP I’m unwell. I need to lie down. I need to puke?
CHARLOTTE WHEN I FIND YOU😭🫵🏼🫵🏼🫵🏼🫵🏼
Five stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ superb. Amazing. Profound. Enchanting, haunting, powerful, soul-blazing.
Charlotte’s books have altered my brain chemistry, I’m sure of it. I can picture these characters so clearly, I can feel Rowan’s hair beneath my fingers and taste the salt on my lips on a stormy, wayward breeze while seals bark in the distance.
Heartbreak. Elation. Relief. Profound sadness. What it means to be human, painfully and magically. I felt it all within these pages.
I teetered for a moment: the lack of communication between characters and the “love” between Rowan and Dom just wasn’t doing it for me…but the last 20% of the read overshadowed it all! It came in like the tide, slow and steady and known, as is the routine…then it grows and swells and drags me out to sea teeming with imagery, found family, and reconciliation. Powerful stuff. Beautifully done.
Vibes off the charts. Otherworldly and transcendent words on a page that really TAKE me there.
I will be reading Migrations. Once there were wolves took my breath away…and now Wild Dark Shore will take me away on the breeze.
CHARLOTTE WHEN I FIND YOU😭🫵🏼🫵🏼🫵🏼🫵🏼
Five stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ superb. Amazing. Profound. Enchanting, haunting, powerful, soul-blazing.
Charlotte’s books have altered my brain chemistry, I’m sure of it. I can picture these characters so clearly, I can feel Rowan’s hair beneath my fingers and taste the salt on my lips on a stormy, wayward breeze while seals bark in the distance.
Heartbreak. Elation. Relief. Profound sadness. What it means to be human, painfully and magically. I felt it all within these pages.
I teetered for a moment: the lack of communication between characters and the “love” between Rowan and Dom just wasn’t doing it for me…but the last 20% of the read overshadowed it all! It came in like the tide, slow and steady and known, as is the routine…then it grows and swells and drags me out to sea teeming with imagery, found family, and reconciliation. Powerful stuff. Beautifully done.
Vibes off the charts. Otherworldly and transcendent words on a page that really TAKE me there.
I will be reading Migrations. Once there were wolves took my breath away…and now Wild Dark Shore will take me away on the breeze.
I have conflicting feelings for this book. On one hand I found it incredibly boring and on the other I felt it brought an incredibly powerful and meaningful conclusion. I don’t think I fully agree with the hype of this, especially for the first 40-50% but it did prove itself worth towards the end. The structure was a bit all over the place but I did understand the purpose, it just took some getting used to so it was tough to buy into the story and the characters early. I found the setting very intriguing and I’d say fairly dystopian but in the most realistic sense because I would not doubt our world could succumb to these measures. My largest gripe is the character development. I only half cared about each character and I think it’s because with the constant change in perspectives I didn’t get enough of them, it all just felt surface level. I got enough to understand them or have the plot develop but I wasn’t super attached so when the relationships grow (and we come to the end) I didn’t care as much as I know I could’ve. What I give the most credit to is the twists of this- I thought I had everything figured out and I absolutely did not so I’d say that was a job well done.
This was a fast read (power outage, nothing else to do), and I enjoyed it very much. I know not every book has a happy ending, but this one could have. It was a bit of a let down. The book is a bit of an emotional roller coaster, and I enjoyed the different chapters told by the different characters, none of whom were without their issues. This was also a microcosm of global warming. All in all, a solid story.
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