Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was granted the audiobook of Wild Dark Shore (having missed requesting the ebook ARC on the NetGalley site – darn it!) The blurb was downright intriguing so I requested the audiobook, even though my preference is always to read the ebook and imagine everything for myself.
A woman is found, almost dead, entangled in the debris on the shore of the remote island of Shearwater, just a tad north of Antarctica.
The freezing waters could have killed her, and the chunks of flesh missing from her side – surely made by some sharp toothed predator – should have done her in, but somehow she is rescued by the lone inhabitants of this sinking outpost. The Salts appear to be the lone guardians of millions of scientifically important seeds, gathered from all the plants and trees of the world.
(Exotic Banksia Flower – seeds will only root and grow in fire charred soil)
Everyone in this story has a secret – especially the beautiful, shipwrecked Rowan.
Dominic Salt, the father of three precocious children, has his own cache of literal skeletons and spooks in the closet.
As the story slowly unfolds, we learn that Rowan’s home was destroyed in a flash fire back in Australia. She had come to Shearwater because her frantic messages to her scientist husband, Hank, were never answered. What happened to him? Why did he leave with the job still unfinished?
I have to say: that ending was a disconcerting shocker, but after I thought about it for a while, it made a “mystic” sort of sense. How much would you be willing to sacrifice for those you love? There are hints and “foreshadowings” of this throughout the novel. The silent question recurs: what lengths are you willing to go to avenge or save the life of your loved ones?
Once again in a Charlotte McConaghy novel, the wild setting weaves its own frosty personality into this complex, dark tale. It was hard to have to stop listening to this very well dramatized story for mundane needs like sleep and sustenance! The various narrators (Cooper Mortlock, Katherine Littrell, Saskia Maarleveld, and Steve West) did an excellent job of bringing this dark, slow-paced story to life for me.
I highly recommend this – literally – haunting offering from the incomparable Charlotte McConaghy. Many will not like that ending, and I shared that feeling, but I did see a pattern emerging: a magical twist, perhaps, of fate – in turn, suggesting a preordained or supernatural reason as to why Rowan somehow managed to escape death from such a ruthlessly frigid and turbulent ocean.
I highly recommend Wild Dark Shore: the audiobook was very well dramatized and kept me in constant suspense! My thanks to the author, Charlotte McConaghy, her publisher, and NetGalley for an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review. 4.5 well deserved stars, rounded back up to a 5, because this story is still haunting me.
(Expected publication date: March 4th, 2025.)
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