Review by Booklist Review
The humans in McConaghy's harrowing third novel, following Once There Were Wolves (2021), are wholly compelling, but the main attraction is the setting: wild and imperiled, subantarctic Shearwater Island--rightful home to seals and penguins, but also the site of a global seed vault. This venture spawned a research center in addition to the old lighthouse where the Salt family lives, helping scientists tend to the seeds, the veritable future of the planet's biosphere, as drought, megastorms, and wildfire lay waste to the land. But rising, battering seas are undermining the island, the vault, and the sanity of the scientists and the Salts: widower Dominic, oldest son Raff, teen daughter Fen, and young, precocious Orly. Fen prefers the company of seals, so she is on the shore when the pounding waves deliver a shipwrecked woman. Rowan, the injured stranger, recovers under the family's care, but all are beset by an unnerving atmosphere of tension and distrust, hauntings and secrets. Still, Rowan joins the Sisyphean attempt to save the seeds, and love blooms. McConaghy's descriptions of nature's glory and terror are galvanic, the psychological struggles wrenching, the suspenseful action spectacularly choreographed. McConaghy has attained new heights of intensity and lacerating ecological conviction in this complexly plotted, tragic, and all-consuming tale of the battle to survive in a catastrophically changing world.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Australian writer McConaghy (Migrations) depicts in this urgent if uneven saga a family's attempt to survive on a desert island in a near future ravaged by climate change. After fleeing Australia eight years earlier due to fires, floods, and other natural disasters, Dominic Salt lives with his three children on Shearwater Island, a remote former research outpost between Tasmania and Antarctica, where he tends a seed vault meant to replenish global food supplies. His wife, Claire, died before the voyage, and he still has conversations with her in his mind. During a storm, his oldest daughter, 17-year-old Fen, rescues a woman named Rowan who washes ashore following a shipwreck. Radio contact with the outside world is impossible, as all the island's communication systems have been mysteriously destroyed, and it turns out that Rowan's missing husband, Hank, was the team leader of the island's research station. McConaghy ratchets up the tension as the characters' paranoia and mutual suspicion increases and their motives are revealed, though she scuttles the momentum with predictable romantic subplots, and a late-stage plot twist strains credulity. For the most part, though, McConaghy blends entertainment with a sobering message about conservation and the impacts of geographic isolation. Readers of climate fiction ought to check this out. Agent: Sharon Pelletier, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Sub-Antarctic noir meets a love letter to the rapidly disappearing wild world in McConaghy's latest (following Once There Were Wolves). Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of a remote island near Antarctica, home to the Shearwater research base and the world's largest seed bank. Rising seas have been threatening the island, and readers meet the Salts as they are considering evacuating the island with their precious seeds. When a woman named Rowan washes up on shore, the Salts take her in and nurse her back to health. As Rowan recovers, she gets to know the family: Raff, Dominic's oldest son, is doing his best to channel his grief and rage from tragic heartbreak; Fen, his 17-year-old sister, is such a water creature that she lives among the seals; and Orly, the youngest boy, is consumed with love for the natural world. Rowan shares pieces of her past with the Salts, but unraveling the island's mysteries brings them both closer to hidden truths. As the seas rise to swallow the island, a race against time tests each person's love and loyalty. VERDICT As lush as it is taut with tension, this novel is filled with both the joys and ravages of nature.--Julie Kane
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica. Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication--what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie andThe Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island--loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site--is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island's caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs "to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us." One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she's come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic's kids, especially 9-year-old Orly--who never knew his mother--become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light--along with buried bodies--mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters' internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity. Readers won't want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
