Wild Dark Shore ★★★★★

Haunting, sad, and full of yearning. We live in a world that's beset with woes of climate change and we're not prepared for how it will affect living beings who didn't cause it and suffer the consequences for just existing. In between this worldly issues is a dad who tried getting away from it all by bringing his family to a desolate part of the world in hopes that it would shield them from grief. But grief finds everyone.

Edition Read

• Edition Type: Paperback
• Number of Pages: 320 pages
• Date First Published: March 4, 2025
• Publisher: Flatiron Books
• ISBN10: 1250828015
• ASIN: 1250828015
• Language: English

Description

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A storm gathering force.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world's largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island's researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain.

Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn't telling the whole truth about why she's there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she's not the only one on the island with a secret.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love.

Source: GoodReads

Notable Highlights

But she isn’t frightened of the dead. It is only the living who have the power to harm. [loc. 239]

But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed. [loc. 263]

I think of the life these kids are living, surrounded by such beauty, by so much wildness. This place is a dream. Do they think it’s normal? Even my home among the trees was still nothing like this. The animals I shared a stretch of forest with were shy and elusive; if I ever saw them, it was as they ran from me. I’m not even sure I knew places like this island still existed. That a place so alive could survive our colonizing. [loc. 973]

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. [loc. 1329]

Orly says, “Everything will burn or drown or starve, including us.” And it is as though she has brought these deaths with her from a land so hostile I don’t know how I will ever deliver my children back to it. [loc. 1655]

Is this how you feel after being swept in on a current? Will you change shape and put down roots? Or carry on in search of somewhere better? [loc. 2221]

And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves. [loc. 3193]

“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.” [loc. 3791]

It is really fucking sad that it should take loss to know the precise quality of love. [loc. 3964]

“But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.”

Highlights from Readwise, topped up with popular quotes from Goodreads.