A Gripping Mystery: Read an Extract from Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Rowan

I have hated my mother for most of my life but it is her face I see as I drown.

The face I see when I wake from drowning is different. It is rough and wind-bitten and scratchy. It is what I’m looking at when the sudden arrival of pain overcomes me, and I know the image of him will forever be as one with this pain. Whenever I see this face I will remember the burning sting of being dragged upon rocks and flayed open, left raw, I will feel the bursting pressure in my chest; the sensation will be so vivid it will be like it’s happening all over again. His face, a return. A drowning.

Fen

She washes in with the storm, draped upon a tangle of driftwood. The girl sees her from among the seals. She picks her way through their fat sleeping bodies and moves to the surging waterline. Rough waves carry the lump closer, in with the tide. A shape of milky white lit by the moon. A shoulder, she thinks. And seaweed for hair. A hand draped delicately over wood.

The girl wades into the black roar. She dives under and swims out. Reaches for this bulbous thing to help steer it free. When her feet hit sand she rises, dragging the driftwood behind her. Swell slaps at her thighs and hips but she knows how to move with the water so as not to be tumbled. Preparing all the while for something terrible. Something altering. But a last wave sends the tangle onto the beach and the girl parts the curtain of snarled kelp to reveal a face, and it is not swollen or blue or nibbled; it is breathing.

The girl’s name is Fen and she lives here now, on this exposed patch of coastline with the petrels and the shearwaters and the penguins and the seals. She hasn’t been up the hill in a while, to where her family dwells in the lighthouse. She doesn’t like to leave the sea. But tonight the storm, the woman. Lightning on the horizon and rain she can hear approaching fast. She thinks quickly, and then, rather than trying to pull the body free, she drags the entire driftwood barge up the black sand as far as she can. She allows herself another look at this face, at this creature carried in from a sea too vast to make sense of. A gift for them or something rejected? And then Fen runs.

This is a place of storms, but this storm, this one will be the worst they’ve endured since coming here. She knows it as soon as she reaches the crest of the hill and collides with the wind. It takes her off her feet. In the dis- tance she can see the lights of the building. A white shape flies end over end through the air: a bedsheet from the clothesline. They all know not to hang things overnight; someone will be in trouble for that lost sheet. Behind it one of the tool trolleys careens through the grass, is lifted up off its wheels and dumped again, spilling its guts, and this—these precious items being left out—is even worse than the sheet.

In the end she doesn’t have to struggle all the way to the house. Her dad’s been watching and the second he sees her cresting the rise he is running. They meet in the dark, on the trail to the shore. Even his considerable size is nothing against this wind, and he’s stooped almost double as he gathers her towards home.

“Stop!” she shouts. “Dad! We need Raff.”

“I’m here,” says her brother, materialising to take her other side in arms almost as big as their father’s, both of them hurrying her on.

“Wait!” Fen says, knowing that time now will be divided into before and after. “There’s a woman…”

Continue reading the extract here.

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Synopsis

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, 18 and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, 17, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; 9-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back towards the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realises Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

Charlotte McConaghy