“I have hated my mother for most of my life but it is her face I see as I drown…”

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy took hold of my heart from its very first line and has held on since long after I closed its cover. This genre-blending novel takes place on the fictional subantarctic island of Shearwater, home to a vital seed vault intended to safeguard the world’s biodiversity and food supply in the wake of environmental catastrophe. With sea levels rising, Shearwater has been deserted by researchers, and Dominic Salt and his three children, the caretakers of the island, are its final inhabitants. That is, until a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

I didn’t expect this book to change my life. At first, I struggled to move past what I believed was the woman’s ingratitude toward the family that saved her. I did not understand how she felt entitled, she expected, to live in the face of death. But many pages later I came to realize not only that her hardened heart was a result of the pain she carried with her, but that her absence of appreciation juxtaposed the theme of gratitude threaded through the entire novel: gratitude for our life, for each other, and for our Earth.

Despite my initial misjudgement, I was drawn into the mystery of the story, falling deeper into the unknown and longing to understand how it was all connected. The author composes the story through multiple perspectives, each with their own sorrows and secrets. She reveals the mystery piece by piece, constructing the lives of each character alongside the uneasiness of their shared experiences. McConaghy’s words tumble over one another, a message of hope springing forth as her lyrical prose mirrors the beauty of the island and the Earth itself. She places gorgeous emphasis on the natural setting, gracefully describing the rolling hills and grasses, the animal life, the wind, the waves. She illustrates a world that is at once a sacred paradise and an environment facing descent into irreparable brokenness.

So many lines in this book stole the breath from inside of me. Poignant and moving and necessary, they stopped my heart and painted themselves across my mind, pleading to be reread and remembered. 

“We have a debt to pay this whole world,” McConaghy writes, and I will never be the same. This line shook me to my core, illuminating in me the conviction that our Earth gives us everything: our place in the universe, the sustenance we depend on, the beauty that surrounds us, our life. Because our Earth is life itself. And in our selfishness, our greed, our culture of consumption, we take so much of what our Earth gives us without giving anything back, without a moment of gratitude for all that it has given us. We, as humanity, are taking the life from our Earth. And our Earth, in all its generosity, in all its beauty, deserves so much more. It deserves our praise, our care, our voices calling out to save it from the destruction we have caused. It deserves our love, as Wild Dark Shore so touchingly illustrates. 

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other,” McConaghy later writes, imploring the reader to consider the consequences of their actions and the actions of humanity as a whole. But with this line, too, she argues that love—boundless, unconditional love—has the ability to endure even in the midst of pain, of brokenness, of the collapse of the very world around us. Because for as long as we are alive, we are still capable of love. And we must commit ourselves to loving each other, to loving our Earth. We must find a way past our selfishness, knowing that life is so much more than just ourselves. We will not inhabit this Earth forever, but we must protect it for the future of humanity. And for the future of life itself.

Wild Dark Shore is at the same time a celebration and a plea, as McConaghy so carefully constructs the beautiful world in which the story and our own lives take place, only to illustrate its path into darkness as a consequence of our constant craving for more than our Earth can give. This stunning novel has transformed how I understand grief, sacrifice, unwavering love, and life itself. With eyes full of tears and a heart full of gratitude, I am begging you to read Wild Dark Shore and fall in love with the world again and again and again.