Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy ★★★★★

On a remote island in the Southern Ocean, somewhere between Tasmania and Antarctica, a woman washes ashore, barely clinging to a piece of driftwood. The island is home to a scientific research station and a seed vault housing samples of most of the fauna on planet earth, but at the moment it is only inhabited by a single four-person family: father Dominic Salt, his teenage son Raff, teenage daughter Fen, and nine-year-old son Orly. Now there is a fifth.

But why is she here? The island is too small and too remote for it to be purely happenstance that she should wash up on its shores. When she finally regains consciousness, we learn her name is Rowan. Dominic asks her if her destination was the island, Shearwater, and she tells him no.

ROWAN: "A sense of danger prickles my skin. All my life I have had more than a healthy dose of fear working at my edges, but I am also good at reading people, and there are things this father and son are not saying, something they are bristling with, a tension I have not imagined."

Chapters are told from different points of view of the island's inhabitants, and Dominic is equally wary.

DOMINIC: "She's lying to me. I don't know why or about what, but I've seen shifty enough to recognize it...Weird theories chase themselves around in my mind about who this woman is and what she could be doing here. I go a few rounds with the (punching) bag to try to clear my head, get some perspective about what her presence means for us—now that I know she's unlikely to be dying anytime soon. Possibly it means very little. She's another mouth to feed, but she should also be another set of hands to help out. Possibly it means we're in trouble; it will depend on what she's lying about."

The Salt family are in the final days of their habitation on the island—which is being abandoned because of rising sea levels—after a nine year stay. However, there are problems. Before the last ship of scientists left, someone destroyed all of the communications equipment on the island. And the recent storm that delivered Rowan to their beachhead also knocked out most of their power. The next supply ship isn't due for several weeks. They are, effectively, stranded, with no ability to contact anyone.

Both parties are clearly hiding things, and as such there is a constant and persistent tension throughout nearly all of the book. Author McConaghy does a brilliant job of slowly playing out the line, dropping snippets of clarity every chapter. As bits of truth are revealed by each group, Rowan and the Salts begin to trust and care for each other, and the tension is replaced with an impending dread, for there are still significant secrets to be revealed that could shatter their burgeoning affection for each other.

If it was just this cat-and-mouse game of truths and lies, the book would be a solid, gripping read, but McConaghy layers in additional themes and past experiences for the characters that add an emotional pathos to the novel. There is a hefty layer of loss that has been experienced by all of the characters in different ways, and the holes left in hearts from those losses open up opportunities for meaningful connection points. Rowan helps fill the most obvious and significant void—there is no Mrs. Salt on the island—while also helping to break down some walls the Salts have built between themselves. The family helps Rowan warm to the possibility of a life she had never considered.

The losses tend to pile up as each new tragedy is unveiled, and so despite the small steps toward healing the characters take, there is an overwhelming sadness forming the foundation of the book. It's more dark than not, but it's really well done. With only five primary characters to focus on, McConaghy can explore each of them to a significant degree, and she does so effectively and with unique voices and arcs for each. It's tense and sad and more depressing than not, but undeniably well-crafted and worth a read.