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.