Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is a compelling, dark, and lovely novel set on Shearwater, a fictional island based on Macquarie Island halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. The book features the characters of widower Dominic Salt, his three children Fen, Raff, and Orly, and a woman, Rowan, who washes ashore while coming to try to aid her husband, who was the lead botanist on Shearwater.
The Salts had been on the island eight years, with Fen seventeen-years-old, Raff eighteen, and Orly nine. Dominic is caretaker of Shearwater, in charge of fixing things broken, but the people on it a bit broken inside. Dom would speak to his wife, who died of cancer at the time of Orly's birth. Fen sleeps at the boathouse to create space for herself, and Raff's boyfriend Alex committed suicide on the island.
Shearwater is a fascinating setting in the book, with it housing an enormous seed bank containing some three million varieties of seeds. It's there to preserve plants from going extinct, especially in the fact of climate disaster threatening the global food supply. Reference is made throughout the book to deteriorating conditions in the outside world, with fires, floods, and food scarcity. The island is also natively home to plants that don't grow in other regions and the kids' connection to the animals of Shearwater, particularly the whales and seals, is great reading.
Weather conditions on the island deteriorated, and the Salts and Rowan are waiting for the scheduled boat to come six weeks off to evacuate them and the seeds they deem most vital to be saved. It comes out that Rowan's husband Hank had an affair with Fen, thirty years his junior, then wanted to drown all the seeds as he wouldn't have been able to take them off the island and couldn't bear to pick some, but not others. He then tried to drown Fen when she told him she might be pregnant. Around this same time, Alex's brother Tom and his research partner Naija drowned, Alex killed himself, and then Rowan washed ashore. The Salts told her that Hank had left the island, not that he was being held in advance of the rescue ship coming to Shearwater.
The book hops back and forth between first-person narration by the various characters ands that makes it a somewhat disquieting read, but it pays off at the devastatingly beautiful end, with the seed vault starting to flood and Rowan giving Orly her last breaths so that he can live. In the afterword, McConaghy notes having been on Macquarie with her sixteen-month-old son, and how awe-inspiring the island was.
