Wild Dark Shore

 

Wild Dark Shore 

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.