My BookClub Reviews

I had been seeing this everywhere and then a friend highly recommended it, so I bought it immediately.

Here’s the blurb …

From the New York Times bestselling author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves, a novel about a family living alone on a remote island, when a mysterious woman washes up on shore. 

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, 18 and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, 17, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; 9-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back towards the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place. 

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realises Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together. 

A novel of heartstopping twists, dizzying beauty and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is a story about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us is ending.

This novel is very interesting and it tackles climate change in a fabulous way – it’s taken as the new normal and people are trying to live with the consequences.

The writing is lovely

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

This cut very close to the bone – I hope it’s not my mother’s face that I see when I am dying. This is the opening line by the way.

Mostly it is quiet here. A life of simple tasks, of day-to-day routines, of grass and hills and sea and sky. A life of wind and rain and fog and of smiles huddled around a heater and of books read each evening.

This sounds delightful, if only the island wasn’t being inundated because of rising sea levels.

It has been made very clear to us that keeping the seeds safe is more important than keeping ourselves safe.

Humanity’s last hope – and it is a man and his children trying to do it.

Hard not to let my mind flap at the edges of my body, trying to escape the sinking feeling that something isn’t right.

Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are a fool’s weapons.

Where men go there is harm.

So true.

“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.”

This last one points to the theme.

No spoilers, but I must admit to being disappointed by the ending.