In her newest book, Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy transports listeners to a remote island located somewhere between Australia and Antarctica. Here, the Salt family is tasked with keeping a seed vault safe, but the vault is failing. Soon, the family will be picked up and evacuated from the island. While they’re waiting, a woman washes up on shore, looking for her husband, who was a researcher on the island. Told in alternating perspectives, featuring multicast narration, this novel reveals the story of a family who would do anything to protect one another and the world around them.
Tricia Ford: Wild Dark Shore, like your other books, can be described as genre-bending—equal parts literary and mystery with a splash of romance. It’s also a deep dive into setting, character, plot, and the natural world. What inspired this setting?
Charlotte McConaghy: I was enthralled when I learned about the global seed vault in Svalbard, a vault in the ice that had been built to protect the world’s seeds in case of emergency, to protect them against anything that could be thrown at it—and the only thing they didn’t foresee was the melting of the permafrost, which caused the vault to flood. This story sparked the impossible question in my mind: What would you choose to save? I had wanted to tell a story set on Macquarie Island for a few years—the wildlife there is extraordinary—and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to combine this wild and stormy place with the idea of a flooding seed vault and a mysterious stranger carrying secrets.
What inspired this particular cast of characters and the decision to tell the story from alternating perspectives?
Initially in the writing process I struggled a lot with how to tell this story, specifically whose story it was going to be. It wasn’t until I decided to enter the points of view of all five of my main characters that the novel came to life. It was so important to be able to dig down inside each of them, to use their differing opinions or the contrasting ways they experienced the island to create dramatic tension. They all, in their own way, allowed me to explore the themes of the novel: healing from loss, fear of connection, raising children in a perilous time, the interconnectedness of all living things, and the courage it takes to protect the people we love.
Each character has their own specific lens, their own unique way of experiencing the world, they have secrets and lies, and moving between them allowed me to not only build emotional resonance but to understand the rhythm of the mystery beats that would drive the plot forward.
With climate change and the destruction of the natural world being such a strong undercurrent to so much of your writing, is adding that splash of romance a way of bringing in hope? How else do you keep that sense of hope amidst so much foreboding?
Absolutely. I am very much a romantic at heart and I see this novel as a book of love stories. It’s about romantic love between a man and a woman, sibling love, the love of a landscape or a creature, and the love a parent has for their children. These are all the spaces in which I mined for hope, sparks of light and laughter and tenderness and intimacy within the dark. And alongside these gentler emotions, I also find hope in fiercer places: in the drive each character has to never give up, in their courage, their ferocity, their loyalty, and their strength. They take up a purpose and they see it through, and those are the kinds of people I want to read about when the world seems at its most desolate.
