Dear Reader,
Wild Dark Shore came into my life at the same time my children did. I was dreaming up this novel, and writing it, throughout my pregnancies and the first years of my babies’ infancy, and so it naturally formed itself around them, around the spaces they made up in my heart, and the notion of what it means to have and raise children during a time of ecological crisis. Because of this, I knew this novel would be about fear. Fear of not being able to keep our children safe. Fear of the kind of world they will inherit from us. Fear of having to teach them about enduring more loss than we have ever known. But a book about fear must also, crucially, be a book about courage, and more than anything else it must be a book about love.
Wild Dark Shore became exactly this: a book of love stories. Of romantic love, a second chance between a man and woman grieving complicated pasts, and of the simple and true love between siblings. Of the love we might stoke for wild creatures and places, of the love we may feel for a landscape before it burns. It is a story of the kind of love a parent feels for their children, for the rending nature of it, the completeness and the beauty of it. It is about how we speak to them of this world and its damage, how we teach them to love the impermanence of it. But the novel also leaves space for those of us without children, who love this wild planet and who may love other people’s children with as much generosity.
This is a story about a father trying to raise his children on a wild and lonely island, and the woman who washes ashore to change their lives completely. It is eerie and romantic and mysterious; it is full of twists and turns; it is a love letter to the wilderness both beyond us and within us. I very much hope you enjoy it.
– Charlotte McConaghy
