Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore has been chosen as Indigo’s #1 Best Book of 2025, and it is an interesting choice, not because I think it is a bad novel (it’s actually pretty good), but because there are certain elements of the story that feel contrived and uninspired.

Wild Dark Shore is set on a fictional island called Shearwater that is south of Australia and near Antarctica. Shearwater is based on Macquarie Island, an UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to various types of seals and penguins. McConaghy was able to go to Macquarie Island, which is why her setting of Shearwater Island is so evocative.

Now what I love about Wild Dark Shore is that even though McConaghy’s writing is spare, you are still immersed in Shearwater’s incredibly brutal and inhospitable, yet also incredibly fascinating and beautiful, environment. Through McConaghy’s words, I strolled along Shearwater’s roaring shoreline with its crashing waves, made my way through its beaches crowded with penguins and barking seals and fought my way past the gusting wind, fiercely shivering and wishing I had on more layers of clothing.

Wild Dark Shore is about a woman named Rowan who washes ashore Shearwater Island. She is rescued and nursed back to health by Dominic Salt and his three children, the last of inhabitants of the island. Dominic works as the caretaker on the island, which was once populated by researchers and is home to the world’s largest seed bank. But rising sea levels are beginning to flood the seed bank, so Dominic and his children are packing up as many seeds as they can to be transported off the island.

Rowan is cagey about why she came to Shearwater, and Dominic and his children are cagey in return about recent events on the island, such as the sabotaged radios, freshly dug grave and blood in one of the research huts. But they are all forced to trust each other as the storms on Shearwater get worse and as they rush to save as many seeds as they can before the seed bank is completely flooded.

Wild Dark Shore is an interesting mystery story that kept me on my toes, but it is also a story about love and hope in the face of the very real fear of climate change as it makes our world more inhospitable for us. Rowan is running from a monstrous bush fire that destroyed the home she lovingly built over ten years. Dominic and his children, who have lived on Shearwater for nine years, have no idea what kind of world they are returning to once they leave the island. But they all feel that so long as they are with those who they love, they will persevere through anything. And that’s really all I can think about with my own climate anxiety, that as long as I am not alone and I am with those who I love, I can get through it.

Still, it’s too convenient, the relationship that blossoms between Rowan and Dominic and it feels forced. Also, Dominic’s youngest son’s narration does not feel natural, even for a preternaturally precocious ten-year-old. These quibbles of mine do not detract from the intensity of the story, but this book is not as good as my last read, The God of the Woods (which was one of Indigo’s Best Books of 2024).