Wild Dark Shore is very typical of the types of atmospheric books I like to read – I call them my “isolated landscapes” books, set in desolate areas. With this one, the characters couldn’t really get much further from the rest of humanity while still being on earth – an Antarctic island where the communications have been severed. They know a ship is coming, but yet they are trapped.
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is available to buy on Kindle, and as a paperback on 6th November.
This was the first book I read after a run of Zodiac Academy books, so a very different style indeed! I’ll be honest, for the first 20-30 pages, I wasn’t expecting to like it – I thought I’d be rating it around a 3.5. But suddenly it had me gripped and I read it in two somewhat frenzied sittings.
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A basic description would have you thinking this is a thriller – a family living in a lighthouse, tending for a breaking, desolate island, when an unknown woman washes up on their shore and begins to uncover the secrets that are hidden there. Especially as we know early on that the father has rushed to clean up a cabin that is covered in blood.
But at its heart, this is a book about sacrifices, fierce love, isolation, grief and madness. It’s about families who are all each other has, on a tiny island, but are somehow still hundreds of miles apart sometimes. It’s oh-so-tragic in parts and oh-so-wonderful in others.
Can you tell I quickly changed my opinion about this book?
While the first half, maybe more, moved pretty slowly, the magic is in the atmosphere. There’s an ever creeping dread where the supernatural mixes easily with the real, but also the fear that there might be something worse than ghosts. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not a ghost story either – they kind of hover just out of sight.
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The final section of the book had me quite literally holding my breath and sobbing. Wow, what a turnaround!
The characters have so much depth. At times, some of them are unlikeable, and at other times, your heart breaks for them. They’re so wild and free, but also so chained. Orly is just gorgeous, and his short chapters with bursts of knowledge about the natural world that he loves are so quietly beautiful.
The world they live in is so brutal, but it tells us truths about the world that we live in as a whole. The island is disappearing, the seed vault will fail. And yet it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to teach you a lesson on global warming. I suppose that’s what a good narrative does – it presents these horrors to you as literary fiction rather than slapping you round the face with them. It shows them through the eyes of a 9 year old who shouldn’t understand them, but somehow he knows it better than all of us.
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There are scenes from this book that will sit with me for a long time, like the whales beached on the shore that they fight to rescue, even though it takes away their very precious time from another very precious resource. I stand by the fact that this is a book of sacrifices, about knowing what’s important and fighting for it.
The author also does an absolutely brilliant job of writing about the love between parents and children – sometimes strained, sometimes all you have in the world. It was quiet insights like the below (just to note, this is from the ARC so is subject to change potentially!):
“What I miss most is not any of the things I expected. It’s having someone to talk to about our children. The hilarious things they say and do, the insights with which they blow my mind and the ways they change frequently and without mercy. I need her to help me process and deliberate and delight in. I want to laugh with her. To be awestruck with her. I want her to look at me in wonder, acknowledging what profound creations we have made together.”
I wouldn’t know which genre to sit this book in, but just know that I love it and I think it’s a beautiful masterpiece.
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publishers for an ARC of this book.
If you liked Wild Dark Shore, you might also like these books:
- Book Review: The Naked Light by Bridget Collins
- Book Review: Rainforest by Michelle Paver
- We Fell Apart by E. Lockhart Review (We Were Liars Sequel)
The below is my “isolated landscapes” collection of similar desolate places where the setting almost becomes a character in itself.
And here are some other books by Charlotte McConaghy that I am yet to read, but have heard excellent things about and, after loving Wild Dark Shore so much, I have now added to my TBR. Apparently Once There Were Wolves and Migrations are a similar style and tone.
