by Charlotte McConaghy
Wild Dark Shore is easily landing on every book
reviewer’s “Top Five Books of 2025” lists.
Unfortunately, it didn’t land on mine.
The premise did hook me in immediately: a family living in
extreme isolation on a remote island near Antarctica, surrounded by seals,
penguins, and the ocean. Supplies arrive by boat only twice a year. Honestly, that
kind of remoteness fascinated me…while I was listening to it, I could imagine
wanting to try living there. To me, the
island promises quiet, self-sufficiency, and a strange kind of freedom.
Climate change is forcing the island’s evacuation as the
permafrost melts and systems fail. It’s eerie, cinematic, and genuinely
fascinating.
After the death of his wife during childbirth, Dominic moves
his three children to the island to take a job as lighthouse keeper. Once home
to a bustling research station and a seed vault safeguarding the future of
plant life, the island is being abandoned due to climate change.
First of all…Lighthouse Keeper? It immediately made me think of Winter Keeper (you remember from the book,The Wedding People)… the seed vault rang a bell, too. I follow a woman on Instagram who lives in Svalbard, Norway, near the Global Seed Vault….a real place where seeds are preserved to help humanity recover if global food systems fail. Interesting how “keepers,” fictional or real, are all about protecting something worth saving.
Back to the book….a woman, Rowan, washes ashore. She is
injured, bloodied, and barely alive. As the family nurses her back to health,
she begins to sense that something is deeply wrong. Their stories don’t quite
line up...she becomes suspicious. Why do
they whisper behind closed doors? Why has the radio been smashed? Why do
they act like they have seen a ghost after finding out who she is? Then Rowan discovers HER husband’s passport
and laptop hidden beneath the floor of the tool shed. Bloodstains…once scrubbed
clean…linger in the abandoned research facility. What happened here before she
arrived?
At times, throughout the book, it seems like the family is succumbing
to madness…perhaps bred by isolation?
My biggest struggle is with Dominic. He is a man who lets
his daughter sleep on a sub-Antarctic beach because he doesn’t know how to talk
to her. He’s also sleeping with, Rowan, the wife of a prisoner he’s keeping
locked in a freezing underground vault. His ability to compartmentalize is…
extraordinary…wouldn’t you say?
What is this book filled with? Grief, isolation, climate change, guilt,
sacrifice, obsession, and the instinct to survive.
A few things I did like about the book…
I loved the wildness of nature.
My favorite part of the story. The Wombats.
“Wombats have a thing they do in fires. They take their
families underground, into their burrows. They have tunnels under the earth,
and they go down there to take shelter, but they don’t just take their
families, they also take other animals down there. They save everyone they can.
And then the mum and dad wombats stick their bums up into the entrances of the
burrows to block the fire and the ash from coming down. And their bums get
burned, and sometimes they die, but they protect the others.”
I loved that. I didn’t
know that. Made me feel like they
symbolized…a quiet survival, deep rootedness, and non-human endurance…a
reminder that strength doesn’t have to be loud, fast, or visible to be real.
If the world was burning.
Where is your burrow? Who will you save?
Who will save you?
Another moment I genuinely loved was the scene with the
whales washing ashore, and the collective effort to save them. Can you imagine
witnessing that? Being part of something
so urgent and awe-filled, and then carrying that story with you for the rest of
your life?
But then I’m brought back to not being able to recommend it
because the romance between Dominic and Rowan…felt completely out of place. The
characters barely knew each other, hardly spoke at first, and didn’t fully
trust one another…go back up a few paragraphs…Dominic is hiding her husband…what
kind of man is this?
All of that said, I can absolutely see this becoming a
compelling movie. The setting alone is cinematic: brutal winds, icy waters,
storms rolling in over penguin-covered shores. The island feels like a
character in its own right.
Wild Dark Shore has all the ingredients of a
haunting, unforgettable novel…I mean…movie.
