One Author; Three Terrific Tales

By Victoria Tirrel, Library Committee

When I read something I love, I tend to want to read the rest of the writer’s oeuvre immediately. Such was the case with Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore (2025).  In it, the Salt family are the final inhabitants of a remote island near Antarctica charged with tending a lighthouse and rescuing the world’s largest seed bank from rising sea levels due to climate change. Then a mysterious woman is washed ashore. What happens next is the best in fiction—love, loss, trauma, mystery, and huge questions with no simple answers. And that is just in the plot. The prose is also gorgeous.

Reading Wild Dark Shore sent me racing to McConaghy’s previous two books--Migrations (2020) and Once There Were Wolves (2022)—about the collapse of some part of the natural world and a complex person who will do anything to stop the coming extinction.

---

Migrations features the troubled Franny Stone who, in a not-so-future world where the oceans are empty of fish and all birds are disappearing due to climate change, follows the last Arctic terns in the world on their final migration from Greenland to Antarctica (the longest bird migration known). But the increasingly unbalanced Franny is not who she seems. Her drive is inspiring even when the hope of success is miniscule, and the path is treacherous.

Once There Were Wolves also addresses the human impact on environments. In the remote Scottish Highlands a landscape is dying because of a missing link in the ecosystem’s survival chain: wolves. Against the vocal and violent protests of Highlanders—killers of these predators that decimated their livestock—biologist Inti Flynn and her crew reintroduce 14 Canadian gray wolves into the area. What follows is murder and mayhem and perhaps insanity…

In all three of McConaghy’s books, the human characters have unique savant-level skills that make them very strange. Yet you fall in love so deeply that your fear for them as the stories roll along is very real. And you may never learn as much about seals, insects, plants, Arctic terns and wolves than in these three books.

Yet it’s the nonhuman characters of the natural world—animals, land, oceans, trees, etc.—that star here. Perhaps it’s because of how effectively the author evokes the sense that it’s already too late. The threat in each book is already at the brink of changing our world forever. She brings this dystopic future so close that we don’t question our world is bound for collapse tomorrow…if not today…or yesterday.

The stories do not rely on each other, so there’s no order to enjoy these books in. I read them Shores, Wolves and Migrations (backwards by release dates). The writer perhaps grows in skill somewhat from the first to the most recent, but I’d suggest you just get to the library and check out any of these three amazing books that may still be available.

All three of these books are now part of the Coffman collection, living on the Recent & Relevant shelves for the next few months; after they will be shelved together in Fiction under McConaghy.