Wild Dark Shore

Wild Dark Shore is a 2025 novel by the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy, published by Flatiron Books. It is set on Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica that houses a research station and a seed vault, where a family works as its caretakers.

Dominic Salt and his three children live on the island and keep it running, which mostly means maintaining the vault and the equipment and waiting for the season to change. Rowan, a woman who has been shipwrecked, washes ashore, and the novel follows the family's attempt to take her in, the questions they have about how she arrived, and the rising storm that cuts them off from outside help.

McConaghy writes about climate and extinction through the people who work at the edge of both, and the island supplies the book's constraints: a small cast, a limited space and a season that will end. It is a novel about what a family does with a stranger when nobody else can be asked, and about what the vault on their island is actually for.