Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

This 2025 novel is vividly told through the voices of its characters. The Salt family, Dominic (a widower) and his 3 children, son Raff (eighteen), daughter Fen (seventeen), and son Orly, (nine) are the last people on Shearwater Island, a dot in the southern ocean halfway between Australia and Antarctica. They’ve been here seven years – Orly remembers no other home. Though the weather is harsh, the island supports an abundance of plant and animal life. A seed bank repository has been built here, to save for replanting by survivors after climate apocalypse has devastated the planet. 

But sea level is rising rapidly, the seed vault built into permafrost is warming, and the family labor to save what seeds they can. A scientific group made lists prioritizing those to be salvaged, but by the time this novel opens, only the Salt family remain. A ship will come collect them and what seeds they’ve been able to remove from the drowning vault – but that arrival is weeks away and they have no communications. Their radio tower was sabotaged by someone on the island, so the ship crew have no notion of what has occurred. Down to their last rations – food, fresh water, fuel, dying batteries – the Salts live a spartan existence filled with hard work and awful secrets. 

Into their lives, then, comes a woman from the wreckage of a small boat whose pilot died. Fen, living in a boathouse at the beach surrounded by seals and penguins, sees the flotsam, swims out, and pulls in Rowan, who should be dead but insists on surviving. How her arrival catalyzes each family member’s griefs, and how their love changes her, drive the story. 

It’s well-told, unfolding a bit at a time, grounding readers then shifting deeper. Chapters are short, alternating voices; through them we mourn not only the humans but the planet they love. These seeds have been selected for human survival – but what about Earth's co-inhabitants, plants and animals? Do they have no right to a future we have jeopardized? Young Orly, a savant, feels deeply how that question must be answered. And Rowan brings creativity, skill and determination to this haunted place, where the first human population slaughtered colossal numbers of seals and penguins, rendering their carcasses for oil till there were none left, then abandoning the rusty barrels piled at the scene of their enterprise. 

Tragedies and secrets whisper to every character – so much of themselves is buried on this storm-whipped island, the reader wonders what leaving will do to them. McConaghy puts us into frigid water, fierce wind, constant hunger, and the human drive to finish what tasks we are set. Partner to their love of Shearwater is dread of what returning to society will mean – and in what threatened place it will make any sense to start over.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I took my time reading the essays in this 2013 book by enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, PhD botanist, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY, founder and director of Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robin Wall Kimmerer. In addition to these credentials she is a mother, and student of traditional ways of living with Earth and its creatures. 

She writes beautifully, and she writes of the truths we ignore at our peril: that we are part of nature, that we thrive with our co-inhabitants and suffer when we do them harm. “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth’s beings.” 

She says, “In order to live, I must consume. That’s the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world… How do we consume that does justice to the lives that we take?” 

“Collectively, the Indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest… I am a student of this way of thinking, not a scholar. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am.“ 

In a later essay, she observes, “The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack. Had we not worked waist-deep in the swamp, had we not followed muskrat trails and rubbed ourselves with soothing slime, had we never made a spruce root basket or eaten cattail pancakes, would [her students] even be debating what gifts they could offer in return? In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart.” 

This book is an avenue into a way of thinking whose time is urgently at hand. If we do not soon learn to live with earth and its creatures – plants, animals, rocks, streams and all – as partners, we will die alongside them. Earth itself will continue, but as a host for life, may go dormant for an age. We don’t have to do this, to our home and to ourselves. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a wise woman – read, listen, and heed her words.