This story has a feeling of impending disaster as you turn every page. It is a thriller but maybe not what you might generally expect from that genre.
The setting is an imaginary island called Shearwater, situated somewhere between Tasmania and Antarctica. It is based on the very real island of Macquarie which is a world heritage site and home to penguins, seals and sea birds. It is also home to a bloody and violent history involving oil exploitation and the hunting of seals and penguins nearly to extinction.
The Salt family are caretakers of the island and of the world’s largest seed bank. They are now alone on a small land mass that is threatened by aggressively rising sea levels. All the researchers have long since fled. Then, after the worst, most powerful storm they can remember, a woman, a stranger, is washed up on the shore. I have no idea if it was intentional but this storm is a perfect example of pathetic fallacy where the emotional tone of the characters is mirrored by the weather.
At this point the reader has no idea what is going on or what direction the story will follow. The author cleverly lets you intimate from the tone of the writing that every character you meet has secrets, undoubtedly ones that are dark and difficult.
I began to feel similarities to a ‘Lord of the flies’ situation. Isolation is rarely positive and it can foster a situation of anomie, a sense of alienation and lack of any moral compass. The island of Shearwater displays a breakdown of social and ethical rules that would be acceptable in a functioning society.
The twists in this story make it compelling and I had to keep reading. It is about change, it is about choices and about the power of love used to protect others.
Charlotte McConaghy prefaces her novel with this very apt quote by the American dramatist Thornton Wilder:
‘There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.’