Australian novelist Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel, Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron Books, March 4), tells the story of widower Dominic and his three children, whose already precarious lives—they’re stationed on a remote island, threatened by climate change—are further complicated when a woman washes up on the shore after a boat crash. “McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity,” a critic for Kirkus said of the book, which we named one of our Best Fiction Books of 2025. The author answered our questions via email.

What was the original idea or scene that started you working on the book?

During the 2019-2020 bushfire season, which was the most catastrophic fire season on record for Australia, a story emerged about the rescue of the “dinosaur trees.” For thousands of years, the Wollemi pine was thought to have gone extinct during the time of the dinosaurs but was discovered deep in a forest in 1994, somehow, miraculously still alive. Its location was kept secret from the public as a way of helping it to survive, but decades later, during [that] Black Summer, fires raged towards it. Firefighters were lowered down from helicopters in order to create a barrier with their bodies, desperate to protect these rare and precious trees. The rescue made an impact on us here in Australia, but brought to the forefront the 19 million hectares and 3 billion animals that were not saved. Around this time, I was reading about the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard [Norway], built to safeguard the world’s agricultural seeds in case of emergency, designed to withstand anything and remain standing long into the future. The only thing that wasn’t considered was that rising temperatures could melt the permafrost, and, as a result, the bank flooded. I couldn’t help pondering the question of the things humans choose to save, and why.

You went on a research trip to Macquarie Island, on which you base the book’s Shearwater Island. What was most memorable about that experience?

This was a life-changing experience for me and has created so many vivid memories in my mind, not least of which were the colors, the sounds, the textures and sensations—stepping off the Zodiac onto the black sand, I remember being hit with a wall of sound made by thousands of seabirds, royal and king penguins waddling around my feet, albatross and giant petrels soaring low overhead, huge elephant seal pups practicing their fighting in the shallows or flopping over to nibble our boots. It was extraordinarily rich with wildlife, and staggering that a place like this could still exist somewhere, untouched. But I also remember that alongside this beauty, the island had a darker underbelly. Close by on the beach sat huge rusting metal barrels, remnants of the oil exploitation trade in the 1800s, when sealers and whalers had come to Macquarie to wipe out the fur seal population and almost destroy the penguins by stuffing them into these barrels.

What inspired you during the writing of the book?

Honestly, writing this book is a blur to me now. It existed in my life throughout two very bad pregnancies and many hospitalizations, multiple miscarriages, the sleep deprivation and infancy of my first and second babies—I have no way to know what I was reading or watching at the time, or what inspired me, because I think more than anything the completion of this book was an act of dogged determination and a little bit of delirium!

What books published in 2025 were among your favorites?

I’ve really enjoyed Dream State by Eric Puchner, Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar, and Heart the Lover by Lily King.

Nina Palattella is the senior editorial assistant.