Finding Hope at the End of the World in Our November Pick: Wild Dark Shore

Summary

Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — Episode Summary

Episode Title: Finding Hope at the End of the World in Our November Pick: Wild Dark Shore
Date: November 18, 2025
Host: Danielle Robay
Guest: Charlotte McConaughey (author of Wild Dark Shore)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club centers on Wild Dark Shore, the November book pick by acclaimed author Charlotte McConaughey. Host Danielle Robay and McConaughey engage in a sweeping conversation about the ways literature helps us confront ecological collapse, fear, parenthood, and the meaning of hope at the edge of survival. Interwoven with personal anecdotes, literary analysis, and explorations of craft, the discussion offers deep insight into the novel's powerful themes of grief, resilience, family, and the wild beauty of untamed places.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Hope as Defiance in the Face of Despair

• Danielle reflects on hope:

  "Hope isn't about ignoring what's hard. It's about staring down what's dark and still seeing that flicker of light in the distance. Hope, in a way, is an act of defiance." (03:42)

• Charlotte defines her novel's core:

  "This book is about fear. It is about the fear of raising children in a time of ecological collapse...what's useful is being brave enough to find the hope. And not just hope. Hope has to lead us somewhere. The hope has to lead us to purpose, to action. It has to energize us." (04:26, 53:20)

2. Ecological Anxiety, Motherhood, and Community

• Many mothers have reached out, connecting with the book’s themes:

  "It's been really lovely to hear from particularly, yeah, Mothers who are just feeling like, okay, I don't even know where to start with all of this." (07:31)

• On the empathy of writing from a father's perspective and the labor of parenting:

  "There's something beautiful about being able to experience parenthood from another point of view...And I do think it is a division of labor that becomes quite unfair a lot of the time." (08:08)

3. Our Struggle with the Distant Future & Climate Crisis

• On collective challenges:

  "We actually seem to be incapable of thinking far ahead. And it's a major problem for us...It's not just about us, it's about our children, our children's children." (10:55)

• Importance of fiction as an "emotional entry point":

  "One of the lovely things about experiencing something through a piece of fiction is that it allows you an emotional entry point and you suddenly feel like, okay, I'm not the only one worrying about this stuff." (06:49)

4. Vivid Settings & the Power of Landscape

• Danielle asks if the ocean/coastline is a character:

  "I think the ocean is very much a character and the island is a character...It's able to sort of bring to life all the grief and the trauma and the ghosts and really sort of highlight those things for these characters." (24:19)

• Charlotte describes her own immersive research trip to Macquarie Island, which inspired the novel’s setting (33:02–36:37).

  "I just remember getting down to this island...stepping onto the black sand. And like I said, the sound was just—it bowls you over and there are penguins waddling around your feet, looking up into your face. There are huge elephant seal pups...It's wild and incredibly untouched." (34:29)

5. A Mood Board for Shearwater (the Book’s Setting)

• Textures: sharp rocks, soft moss, wet rain
• Sounds: wind, bird calls (thousands!)
• Smell: salt of the ocean (27:22–28:42)

6. Seed Banks, Survival, and Ethical Dilemmas

• The Salt family in the book safeguards a massive seed bank, inspired by the real Global Seed Vault in Svalbard (29:00–29:41).
• On the ethical complexity:

  "What would you choose to save?...Do we save the things that humans need to eat to survive or do we somehow find a way to stop centering ourselves in this issue...to look at the world as an interconnected web?" (29:41)

7. Craft & Structure: Multiple Perspectives and the Importance of the Opening Line

• Charlotte shares her process: iterations of POV and structure until the intimate, five-voice narrative came together:

  "Initially that was part of the problem...I wrote a quarter of a draft just from Rowan's point of view. But I was really missing getting inside the heads of the family, the kids, and Dom." (42:33)

• On powerful first lines:

  "I do believe strongly in a good opening line. I don't like a wasted opening line...What's going to grab people's kind of interest and imagination?" (13:31)

8. Themes of Motherhood, Childfree Women, and Care

• Danielle and Charlotte discuss Rowan, a central character who does not want children, and how the book resists stereotypes:

  "I also wanted to speak to or demystify the stigma and the stereotypes that are around women who choose not to have children...There are so many complex, nuanced reasons why a woman might make that decision. And I wanted to sort of make space for Rowan to have as much depth of feeling as any woman with a child." (48:59)

9. Love, Nurture, and Environmental Action

• On acts of faith in the face of uncertainty—parenthood, gardening, tending seeds:

  "There is so much beauty in finding those moments of nurture and life. Laughing with your children, working in a garden, planting something. These are all acts of love and those are the things that bring us hope." (51:48)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Hope:
  "Hope...is an act of defiance." – Danielle Robay (03:42)
• On Parent-Child Empathy:
  "It's because we're learning. We're the ones that have to learn most of the time." – Charlotte McConaughey (08:08)
• Vivid First Lines:
  • “The animals are dying. Soon we will be here alone.”
  • “When we were eight, Dad cut me open from throat to stomach.”
    (13:20)
• On Environmental Action:
  "Hope has to lead us to purpose, to action. It has to energize us or it’s useless as well." – Charlotte McConaughey (04:26, 53:20)
• On Writing and Experience:
  “...Seeing something and feeling it and experiencing it with your own body...changed everything.” – Danielle Robay (44:47)
• On Women Who Choose Not to Have Children:
  "There are so many complex, nuanced reasons why a woman might make that decision...I wanted to show that she had the same capacity for love and nurture, because she is. She's so nurturing, she's so loving. She's a mother without kids." – Charlotte McConaughey (48:59)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening on Hope at the End of the World: 03:42
• Charlotte on Fear, Hope, and Ecological Collapse: 04:26
• Motherhood and Fiction as an Emotional Entry Point: 06:42–07:54
• Perspectives on Parenthood (fathers & mothers): 08:08–10:00
• On Thinking about the Distant Future: 10:26–12:02
• Description of Favorite Literary Forests (Hamnet): 12:09
• Charlotte’s Process: Structure and First Lines: 13:05–14:34
• Setting as Character: Ocean, Island, and Sensory Moodboard: 24:19–28:42
• The Real Seed Bank and Inspiration for the Setting: 29:00–36:37
• Multiple Narrators and Evolving Relationships: 42:33–48:25
• Childfree Women & Demystifying Stigma (Rowan): 48:25–51:09
• Final Reflections on Hope and Action: 51:48–53:20
• Speed Read Game (literary favorites): 54:02–55:56

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Speed Read Game — Quick Hits (54:02)

• Trope to ban forever: Love triangles
• Trope to defend: Enemies to lovers
• Favorite literary landscape: Stormy coastline
• Book to recommend: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
• Book to re-read for the first time: Claire Keegan's novellas
• Book that shaped worldview: Felicity by Mary Oliver

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Other Book Mentions

• Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
• Felicity by Mary Oliver
• Claire Keegan’s novellas
• What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

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Summary

This episode offers a powerful meditation on hope and survival in literature and in life, particularly as we confront global climate anxieties. The discussion embraces the roles of fiction and storytelling as vessels for empathy, community, and urgent change. Charlotte McConaughey’s personal journey—from becoming a mother to voyaging with her newborn to a remote island—breathes life into the novel’s narrative, while her craft insights deliver practical wisdom for aspiring writers. Listeners leave with a sense that to love something—family, wildness, or even the future—is to risk and to act, even when the end feels close at hand.

Transcript

[Danielle Robay]

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[Reese's Book Club Host]

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[Charlotte McConaughey]

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[Reese's Book Club Host]

Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club is presented by Apple Books.

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Hi, I'm Danielle Robay.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club. This week we're talking about love and hope at the end of the world. I once heard a psychologist describe hope in a way that stuck with me. He said hope is the only positive emotion that requires uncertainty or negativity to be activated. I think most people mistake hope for blind optimism. But hope isn't about ignoring what's hard. It's about staring down what's dark and still seeing that flicker of light in the distance. Hope, in a way, is an act of defiance. And that's exactly what came to mind when I read this month's Reese's Book Club pick. Wild Dark shore by Charlotte McConaughey.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

This book is about fear. It is about the fear of raising children in a time of ecological collapse. I think what's helpful, what's useful, is being brave enough to find the hope. And not just hope. Hope has to lead us somewhere. The hope has to lead us to purpose, to action. It has to energize us. Or it's useless as well.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Set on a remote island at the edge of the world, Wild Darkshore is part climate thriller, part literary love story. It's filled with mystery arrivals, sabotaged radios and grave digging. But it's also achingly human. The characters aren't just fighting nature, they're also asking what future is still worth surviving for. As you can imagine, the imagery is vivid. The island itself feels alive. The sea, the thawing tundra, the animals all mirroring the Beauty and grief of change. And through it all, McConaughey reminds us that even in collapse, there's connection. Even in darkness, there's wild, defiant love. So if you're looking for a novel about what it means to love something enough to save it, you're in the right place. Let's turn the page with Charlotte McConaughey. Charlotte, welcome to the club.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Thank you. Thank you so much.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Actually, I'd rather say welcome back to.

[Danielle Robay]

The club because we had the pleasure of talking with you earlier this month about your latest novel, Wild Dark Shore. And I have to tell you, I've been thinking about something you said since then, that you wrote this right after becoming a mom. And although it's a pretty intense plot, you said the actual act of writing was quite optimistic, it was signaling the trying. And I'm curious what your fans are saying. Are there any new moms that are getting in touch with you?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yes, I think, you know, a lot of the people that have been reaching out are mothers. And it's been really kind of wonderful to hear from people who are kind of grappling with the same big questions and the big issues. And I guess it gets quite tricky to know how you should feel about this stuff, how you should talk about it, what you should do.

[Danielle Robay]

When you say this stuff, you mean climate change?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, yeah. So exactly. Yeah. The major kind of ecological shifts that we're about to sort of start experiencing on a. On a much more kind of frequent level. And I think the sort of inclination is to become quite apathetic because it's difficult to kind of take it all on on a day to day basis. It's really hard to grapple with the enormity of this. It becomes so big that you sort of don't know how to tackle it. But one of the lovely things about experiencing something through a piece of fiction is that it allows you an emotional entry point and you suddenly feel like, okay, I'm not the only one worrying about this stuff. There are other people out there that feel the same way I do.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

And you suddenly feel less alone in this sort of massive struggle, and everything becomes validated. It becomes easier to bear this sort of heavy burden of it. And that's what I've been finding. It's been really lovely to hear from particularly, yeah, Mothers who are just feeling like, okay, I don't even know where to start with all of this.

[Danielle Robay]

I'm curious what they're saying exactly. Like, why do you think mothers in particular are feeling pulled towards this? I mean, obviously You're a mom.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

But the plot of the book is.

[Danielle Robay]

Really more about a father.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, that's true. Well, there's something beautiful about being able to experience parenthood from another point of view. I think, as women, we are very good at empathizing with other people, with other human beings. And it's kind of an exciting thing to get into the mind of a father and to sort of, you know, to experience it through that lens for him. You know, there's specific scenes in this book where he is grappling with the sort of weight of having to parent alone, but also reflecting on his memories of his wife and how she was able to learn what to do. And I do think it is a. This is a thing that a lot of fathers do. They assume that we just have this inherent knowledge because we are the ones who figure out what to do. But in fact, it's because we're learning. We're the ones that have to learn most of the time.

[Danielle Robay]

Wow.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

So we take that on, and it is a division of labor that becomes quite unfair a lot of the time. So there's a really. I think there's a lot of mothers who are really kind of liking that this father is having to acknowledge the work that his wife did before he realized and before he had to take on that work himself. So that's one thing. And I think there's also just, you know, there's themes of motherhood. Even though Rowan's not a mother, she is a mother in a lot of ways. She becomes a really sort of incredible mother to these children, to this in particular, I think. And women can kind of recognize that. That sacrifice, and that's also just a human thing. It's not a mother thing. It's a human thing. We are very good at sacrificing ourselves for children.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

I think you make a really good.

[Danielle Robay]

Point that I didn't think about until you just said it.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

I'm not a parent yet.

[Danielle Robay]

I hope to be a mom one day.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

And reading your book, it was really.

[Danielle Robay]

Cool to think about motherhood through the father's eyes. There was something really interesting there. It was voyeuristic, maybe in some ways. And also, I think it seems like human beings have a really difficult time thinking about the distant future. We're really good when something is tough right now.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

But thinking 5, 20, or 100 years.

[Danielle Robay]

Into the future and planning for that, for some reason, is really hard for us collectively. And your book, obviously features the natural world at the forefront. And I can tell you just have a deep love for the planet and its well being. What was your favorite sort of fantastical world from fiction that isn't your own? If we were to go back into your literary memory.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Oh, wow, that's a good question. I mean, I think just to respond to your comment that is so spot on that we don't. We actually seem to be incapable of thinking far ahead. And it's a major problem for us at the moment. We're just kind of very concerned with day to day lives. And yet you're right. If there is a crisis in the moment, we respond so amazingly. You know, we get to see the best in humanity. The best of people come out when we have a crisis. And which is why it's really hard to sort of swallow this fact that we are just not doing anything about the major crisis of our time. And it frightens me because I think about. It's not just about us, it's about our children, our children's children. I just. I hate the thought of my kids and their kids growing up in a world where there's no wildness, no wild creatures, no wild places. Okay, so book worlds that I've been really inspired by.

[Danielle Robay]

Is there an imaginary forest or like an alien planet that you would most want to visit from your literature day, like from reading?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

I love the way that Maggie o' Farrell writes the forest in Hamnet. So this is a kind of historical forest, I suppose, that she's able to inhabit and bring to life through the character of Shakespeare's wife. She is just the most fabulous character. I love her so much. She is wild, she's unapologetic. She's really connected with the sort of. Yeah. The natural world and the wilderness within herself as well. She just sort of strides out into this forest. And particularly in the birth scene where she is. She knows she's going into labor, so she takes herself off into the forest and just gives birth on her own there. Because that's where she feels most sort of herself and most free. And she knows that's where her child needs to come into the world. So I loved, I loved that forest. That's a beautiful kind of place to be in, I think.

[Danielle Robay]

Do you try and grab people with an insane opening line? Because I think you're a master at it. You pick a line that just drops you into the story right away. If I can share a few with people.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

The animals are dying.

[Danielle Robay]

Soon we will be here alone. Another is when we were eight. Dad cut me open from throat to stomach. Oh my God.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

How did you come up with These, quite often, they actually are the first lines I write. So it's a way of immersing myself into the story in a way. I do believe strongly in a good opening line. I don't like a wasted opening line. So I sort of. I do think about, okay, what's going to teach people the most about my character, this world? What is going to grab people's kind of interest and imagination? I mean, that one from wolves. Once there were wolves. That opening is pretty extreme, and it also requires you to sort of keep reading to understand how that could be possible. It's not a fantasy novel or a horror novel. It's about a woman with mirror touch synesthesia. So she actually feels the sensations she sees other people experiencing. You know, that's such a shocking way to experience the world. It's very, very unusual. And so I just. I wanted something that really kind of presented the strangeness of that.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

I had a friend on the podcast.

[Danielle Robay]

Named Chelsea devontez, who's an author, and she said to me, write one true thing. That's your opening line. I've also heard writers say, when you think you're done, go back to the beginning and delete your first line. Because your second line is usually the first line. The first is just not necessary. You're nodding. Is that advice that you follow?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think the ending is. Is so, so deeply linked to the beginning.

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[Charlotte McConaughey]

You absolutely need to look at your final line and your first line. And even just the first scenes, the last scenes, they need to work together. They need to reflect each other, echo each other. I would never, ever send anyone, you know, like a partial draft of anything or the first chapters. My editor kind of. I think she would love to have the first chapters, but I would never send them because I know that they won't be right until I know what the ending. Until I've written the ending. Go back, make sure that that sort of opening really kind of gives you a hint of what's coming and also correctly sort of represents the character and what they. What they need and what they're going to go through, their flaws, their transformations. And I would agree, like, if I sort of felt like the first line was not the right line. Absolutely. Cut it. It needs to be perfect. It needs to kind of. It's almost like it needs to be a thematic opening for the whole book.

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[Charlotte McConaughey]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

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[Reese's Book Club Host]

Excludes Massachusetts there's magic in books. The way one story can make you laugh, another can make you cry, and the right one can stay with you long after the last page.

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On TikTok.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

That magic doesn't just stop when you turn the last page, it multiplies. Readers are swapping their favorite genres, highlighting lines that feel personal and sparking conversations that travel across the globe. One person's review can put a forgotten classic back on the bestseller list. One reader's reaction to a plot twist can connect with millions who felt the exact same way. And one recommendation can grow into you joining a fandom you never knew you needed. This isn't just talking books. It's the book community on TikTok, where stories live on long after the last chapter, where discovery never ends, and where your next favorite book is always just a scroll away. At Just Roll, they believe the kitchen is where joy lives with their refrigerated dough. There's no fussy proofing, no hours of waiting, just big smells, big smiles and that first irresistible flaky bite. They do the hard part so you could skip straight to the fun. Just Roll Puff Pastry is made with non GMO high quality ingredients ready to roll with parchment paper straight from the fridge. No thawing, no stress, just golden bakery worthy layers every single time. With Just Roll, Every Bake is simple. From savory show stopping appetizers to sweet dessert masterpieces, this is a fresh way to bake. Familiar but better. Find Just Roll Puff Pastry in the refrigerated section of your grocery store or visit justroll.com to near you.

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[Danielle Robay]

I want to start from the very beginning of Wild Dark Shore, you write, I have hated my mother most of my life, but it is her face I see as I drown. It's another big line. Charlotte, what were you trying to telegraph to the reader with that?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

So I think it's doing a couple of different things. The first is that it's telling people that this is going to be a story about motherhood in different forms and parenting and what it means to sort of have a mother and be a mother or not be a mother, but parent. You know, it's those themes, those bigger themes. It's also, I think, letting people know that Rowan is she's kind of someone who's almost living on borrowed time a little bit. When she arrives in this place, it is like a drowning has brought her there and it's like she has to awake to a new life and a new place. She's been through something very traumatic, but she's survived it. So she's a survivor. She's, you know, very sort of strong in that way. But she's she's also, in a way, you can kind of look at her time on the island as it's like bonus time. Almost it's like when she got here, she'd already died and come back. So everything is sort of extra in a way, and she has to grapple with what that means, what it means to be there, to have survived this. There's a lot of themes around bodies, around water, around drowning and surviving, and, you know, it's just. It's a very. It's. It's. It's pointing to a lot of thematic things in the book.

[Danielle Robay]

So the story takes place on an Arctic island called Shearwater. And obviously, obviously, the climate and the weather is really harsh. There's violent storms, there's howling winds and this constant threat of rising sea levels and permafrost thaw. Why make a family saga happen in a place that is so hostile to human survival?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Well, for starters, because what a great story it makes. We love survival stories. They're fun, they're exciting, they're thrilling. But it's also a really sort of prescient indication of where we're headed. There are climate refugees all over the world ordering already. There are going to be many, many, many more in future years. So there will be many families who are trying to survive in dangerous places. And I think it's sort of important to make that feel present and real and normal. I don't know, it just felt like a really rich story world to be out on this kind of beautiful, remote, wild place that is a delight to these characters. They love it. They feel extremely connected to it. It's a place that's. That's given them life and joy and connection to each other, but it's also a place that started to become dangerous. And, you know, this is, I think, speaking to where we're headed, what's about to happen. We have this need for wild places, but the terrible thing is that these wild places are either due to climate change, they are either going to disappear or they're going to become threatening to us. And I just wanted to sort of bring that issue to life while also letting readers inhabit a space that's really beautiful and strange and. And, yeah, dangerous, thrilling, exciting.

[Danielle Robay]

Did you think of the water as a character itself? Like the shoreline or the coastline?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, I think. I think the ocean is very much a character and the island is a character. The shoreline is a space that is changing. You know, it's being damaged and swallowed up by waves and storms. And so, particularly for Fen, I think the character who has sort of taken herself down to this beach, she's fleeing a trauma, but she's also just trying to grapple with her coming of age, turning into a woman, going from a child to a woman's body and doing that without her mother. And it's sort of. It's a complex time for her. So she's taken herself down to this beach to live on this beach with the seals that she loves and the birds. But during the course of this book, the storms are becoming so kind of savage that the beach is changing shape. She can see that, you know, this place that she loves is kind of disappearing before her eyes and becoming quite dangerous. So absolutely, it's a character. You know, I think a lot of what happens to these characters is because of this place. It's able to sort of bring to life all the grief and the trauma and the ghosts and really sort of highlight those things for these characters. This is a. This is a place where you can't escape anything, any inner turmoil. You know, it really brings to life all the issues that they would rather keep. Keep silent.

[Danielle Robay]

So glad that you mentioned fen sleeping with the seals because I have to tell you, I giggled at that part because I live in Los Angeles and about two and a half hours away by car is San Diego. And the first time I ever went to San Diego, I saw all these seals and I thought this was going to be so gorgeous and they smell so badly. And I was thinking about fans sleeping with these seals. But I do think that it's actually really important to bring that up because you're right. There is a beauty in the novel, too. There's seal colonies, there's hundreds of penguins, there's singing whales, there's beautiful mossy hills and crystal blue lakes. And I was thinking about. This is sort of a silly question, but I was thinking about all of those things. And if you had to pitch the.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Book as a mood board with textures.

[Danielle Robay]

And sounds and smell, what would it be? If you could give me three textures, two sounds and one smell.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Oh, gosh. Okay. Textures. The textures would be sharp rocks, soft moss, maybe, or like soft tussock grass and wet rain. Mist, maybe. They would be the textures or like even this coarse sand. I don't know. What was the next. What was the next one? Two.

[Danielle Robay]

Two sounds and one smell sound.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

So the sounds would be the wind and the bird sounds. So the. The sound of this place is extraordinary. And it was. This was. This was my experience of arriving on Macquarie Island. It was just a wall of sound and it was thousands and thousands of birds. So it's penguins, different types of penguins. It's albatross, it's giant petrels. There's just so much beautiful bird sound and the wind is really, really, really powerful. Takes you in the face and in the body and doesn't sort of let you free until all of a sudden it does. It's gone. It's very changeable like that. And one smell.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Yeah.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

It's so funny. I've actually had this. People have brought this up with, with me before about the smell of seals.

[Danielle Robay]

That's funny. I'm not the only one.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

No. But you know, this was not. It's. I don't have any recollection of finding them smelly. I don't know what it was. Yeah, I. Because I was right in them, right around them and I didn't. I don't have any memory of a smell of them, which is so funny. I mean, maybe they did stink and I was just so kind of dazed by the. By the strangeness of it that I didn't notice. So a smell, maybe that salt smell of ocean.

[Danielle Robay]

I was thinking that too.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah. I think it's salt. I love salty smell. And I had a lot of moments in the story where Rowan and Dom were kind of smelling that on each other's body. So it became quite an erotic smell in the story, which I like as well.

[Danielle Robay]

So the Salt family is on Shearwater because the father, Dominic, is a caretaker of this massive seed bank. And Charlotte, I actually didn't know what a seed bank was before reading your book. So this was cool to learn about from fiction. So it's seeds for any plant in.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

The world that you can think of.

[Danielle Robay]

Are stored in this underground vault as a bit of an insurance policy. It's in case plants get wiped out by climate disaster. And these seeds help humanity start over.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Yeah, this is wild.

[Danielle Robay]

It sounds like it's like out of science fiction, but this is inspired by a real place. And I read that you actually got to visit a sub Antarctic island which gave you inspiration for this book. Is that true?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

That's right. Yes, very much so. So, yeah, seed banks are real. There's. There's seed banks all over the world. There's many of them. And the one I sort of based it on was the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard. And it actually houses agricultural seeds. So anyone in the. Any country in the world, it's like a. It's like a bank. You send your seeds there for safekeeping. Syria has already needed to retrieve seeds after the terrible war. Yeah. So it's actually a very, very important place. The only thing they didn't foresee was that the Temperatures would rise enough to melt the permafrost and it flooded. That was so kind of profoundly, such a moment of insight, I think, for just how willfully blind we are being to this problem. And also just got me thinking about what would you choose to save? What would you save if you had that moment in an emergency? And so what I decided to do was to bring a seed bank down to my island, but not just to house the agricultural seeds. I wanted to have all of the seeds of the world, the strange, the unusual, the things we don't need. And then I asked my characters to choose what to save and it gave them this really big ethical dilemma around, okay, so in an emergency, do we save the things that humans need to eat to survive or do we somehow find a way to stop centering ourselves in this issue, to stop this kind of incredibly self absorbed way of thinking, to become aware that that way of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place and, and to somehow try and look at the world as an interconnected web, you know, and to understand that the only way out of this is together. And so that's what Orly sort of represents, you know, he, as the voice of this sort of very innocent, very passionate child, is able to kind of look at this issue and say, well, humans are probably going to be okay. Maybe we should be saving the kind of, the strange, the unusual and beautiful things that exist in their own right purely because they exist. And yes, the island Shearwater is based on Macquarie island, which is a real sub Antarctic island halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

How many people work there?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

There's a science base that houses, I think it's about 20 people at any one time. And so they live there. They sort of live there permanently for, you know, you can go for a season or you can go for a few seasons and research, but there's no, nobody else on the island. It's just full of animals. Really incredible, strange, beautiful animals. And I, I was really struggling with the start of this book. I was writing and rewriting and finding it really hard to connect and I realized I, I hadn't planned to go to Macquarie because it's quite difficult to get there. There's only one boat that goes at one time I time of year. But I just realized I, I had to do this. Unfortunately. I had just had a baby, so he was coming with me. I.

[Danielle Robay]

Your baby came with you?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

And it was very insane, actually. I remember contacting the company and just saying, would this be crazy to bring a baby on this adventure? Voyage. And they said, well, we've never done it before, but sure, if you want to, if you want to give it a go, bring him down.

[Danielle Robay]

Because I've heard that the waters near Antarctica are very choppy. It's like a lot of people get sick trying to go there. Is that the same?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

It's a very wild ocean. In the lead up to this trip, I was having sleepless nights just thinking, what have I done? It's two weeks on a boat. You can't just get off if you're really sick. You know, adults can take seasickness tablets, but babies can't. So, yeah, it was. And I was really questioning myself as a parent at this point. Like, what am I? Just the worst mother in the history of the world? But I also couldn't leave him. I couldn't. You know, you've just had a baby, you can't leave them for two weeks. And so it was this really just desperate sort of, I don't know, decision making process. I also had a partner who's very gung ho and he's like, it'll be fine, relax.

[Danielle Robay]

Did he come with you?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

He did, yeah. Of course. I would never have gone on my own with my baby. I definitely needed Morgan there as backup. And actually it was so great. It was wonderful. It was not bad at all. We had the luckiest, calmest seas. Seriously, somebody was looking out for us on that trip.

[Danielle Robay]

Cool.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

What a wild story. It was amazing. And yeah, I just remember getting down to this island and climbing onto the Zodiac and heading out to this sort of incredibly mist shrouded, dramatic, beautiful place and stepping onto the black sand. And like I said, the sound was just. It bowls you over and there are penguins waddling around your feet, looking up into your face. There are huge elephant seal pups just fighting next to you or like flopping over to nibble your boots. There's albatross flying low. It's just wild and incredibly untouched. I don't think I realized that there are places like that that still exist, you know that where animals can be so unafraid of people. It was a really, really powerful experience for me. But it's also quite a feat that it's still like this because it nearly was totally wiped out by the oil exploitation trade in the 1800s. Sealers and whalers just went down in droves. They were wiping out the animals. A whole, whole species of fur seal went extinct. All the penguins nearly. They were herding them into these huge rusting metal barrels to squeeze them for their oils, which is just so heartbreaking and so grim and awful. And those barrels still sit there on the sand with penguins now waddling around them. Just. It's such a moving thing to see in a way, because you can feel that this blood spilt is still there on this island. You know, it hangs really heavy in the air there. There is a hauntedness to the place that I did not expect. And that really changed everything in my book. I suddenly realized what this book was. It's a. It's a haunted novel. It's a gothic romantic mystery about a family haunted by ghosts on an island haunted by ghosts. So, yeah, the trip was just incredible. It changed everything for me.

[Danielle Robay]

Charlotte. Every week I ask our guests what they've bookmarked this week. It can be a quote, a poem, something you've saved on Instagram. What have you bookmarked?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

I've been reading what We can know by Ian McEwan. It's his new novel, which is set in the future, and it's set in a flooded world. Basically, the seas have risen. And so I have actually been bookmarking a lot of lines from that. He's got this really kind of wild vision of the future, which has been really kind of opening my eyes to what we possibly might be looking ahead at. So I've definitely bookmarked many of those pages.

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[Charlotte McConaughey]

Sure thing.

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[Reese's Book Club Host]

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[Reese's Book Club Host]

Listen to Reese's current Pick and browse.

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[Danielle Robay]

I feel like we've gotten into the setting of this book, but there's also a lot of interpersonal dynamics and relationships at play. Another unique thing about your book is that it's narrated by five different people. There are so many voices and minds. For you as the writer to begin, I'm so curious which relationship in the book changed the most between the first draft and the final.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, it was tricky for me to kind of inhabit all of them. And initially that was part of, I think, the problem with my sort of struggle to understand what this book was. I was struggling to know whose story it was. So, you know, I wrote a first draft. I wrote a quarter of a draft just from Rowan's point of view. But I was really missing getting inside the heads of, of the family, the kids and Dom. And it also didn't work for the mystery genre. I needed to be able to move into their heads in order to create dramatic tension and dramatic irony. You know, he knows that, but she knows that. They're not. They're keeping things. And I wanted. Yeah, they're keeping secrets. And I wanted, I wanted the readers to know that. So then I did a draft where it was just all third person with everyone and I was missing the intimacy of the first person.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

So.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Oh, I mean, then I did a draft where I had three families living in this lighthouse and it was totally different. It was really noisy and chaotic. It was fun. But actually I realized this book needed to be quiet.

[Danielle Robay]

Charlotte, how many years did it take you to write this?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

I pitched it to my editor long before I got pregnant. And then it was over the course of, I was doing all this research, plotting, planning, character work, heaps of work. In the build up, I was struggling, like I said, with this sort of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, realized I got way past my due date, my submission date, realized I had to get to Macquarie and enough was enough. I went down, did my two week trip, got back, I was like all Right. This book is getting written now, or it's not getting written. I sat down and I wrote the whole thing in a month, and that was it.

[Danielle Robay]

And then I got chills when you said that. I think that that's actually a really powerful share, because we think that writers can have these imaginations that we don't have and dream things up. And the fact that seeing something and feeling it and experiencing it with your.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Own body, your own eyes, changed everything.

[Danielle Robay]

I think is such a point of inspiration.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, there's that old adage that we have to write what we know. In some respects, I don't think that's true. We can write what we imagine, but in others, I do think it is in terms of what we can feel, what we've experienced in our bodies, what we've experienced in our hearts and our minds. Those are the things we know that we can bring to characters and to stories. And, you know, the story can be as wild and as outlandish and as fantastical as we want it to be, but what we know is a people, you know, and how we inhabit spaces. So, yeah, bringing the world to life really brought the whole thing to life, and it brought the character to life for me as well. Suddenly realizing this place that they were in really kind of grounded me in their bodies and grounded me in the way that they might interact with each other. So one on one, I had to work out all the dynamics one on one, and then I had to work out the dynamic between this whole group of people that were going to be stuck in this lighthouse together. And it was a difficult process. It was challenging to do that, but it was also quite a beautiful process. I loved getting to know them all so intimately and feeling like I was part of that family and that I was there with them on the island. And in terms of who changed the three kids? Well, no, Ollie never changed. He was the same right from the get go. And he was such a joy to write. He was just a source of total delight for me the whole way through. But Fen and Raphael changed a bit because the draft I sent to my editor didn't have very much Raff and Fen in it. And she came back and she was like, I think we need more of the kids. We need more of these teenagers. And I was like, oh, yeah, we definitely do.

[Danielle Robay]

Do you think for tension? Because Orly was kind of like the unbridled optimism.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yes.

[Danielle Robay]

And so what were you trying to. Or what was your editor trying to add back in?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

I think she felt like, if they. If they're gonna be here on this island, they have to earn their keep. You know, in a book that's only about five people, every character has to be really strong, really complex. If we're gonna move into their minds, which we do, they need their own struggles, their own transformations, their own plots, in a way. And so. And they had a little bit of that, of course, but she just encouraged me to dig deeper and give them more. And what came out of that was really, really important. Like, I can't imagine the book now without their sort of internal struggles and their storylines. And, you know, there's a sequence where Fen's kind of thing is that she's really frightened for her father, who seems to be trapped in this haunting. He's trapped in his grief and this. And holding onto this ghost of his wife. And so. And she's the one that is most concerned about that. And there's a sequence where she decides that in order to free him from that, she has to burn all of her mother's possessions that he holds onto. And this was a really powerful scene for me because I could. I could feel it from both their points of view. You know, the terrible tragedy of losing the parts of your wife that you've held onto versus the sort of desperate need to free someone from that. And so that was all new, you know, that came in after the first draft, and I think the book's a lot richer for it.

[Danielle Robay]

So at the beginning of our conversation, we talked about motherhood, because you had just had a baby when you wrote this, and there's a character, Rowan, in the book who is a woman who decidedly does not want children. And I noted that. And then our whole team of producers are women, and they all noted that separately, too. And I think it's because it's a.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Position we don't hear very often, especially.

[Danielle Robay]

Written about in fiction. What were you wanting to explore with Rowan when it came to parenthood?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, so I think she's doing a couple of things. Firstly, she is an eco pessimist. She believes the worst is happening is coming. You know, she. She actually thinks that everyone's either going to burn or drown or starve. And this is due to a lot of trauma that she's gone through in her life. She's. She's essentially a climate refugee. She's had her home burned. She's got nowhere to go. That's how she's kind of feeling when she arrives in this place. And I think, due to that, she's decided that she doesn't want to have children that she can't keep safe. And this is something that. Actually, a lot of people, a lot of young people are now asking really big questions about whether or not to have children. What's our responsibility to children? What's our responsibility to the planet? It's a really difficult kind of space now, I think. And a lot of people. I wanted to acknowledge all the people that are making really selfless choices for the benefit of this planet. I also wanted to speak to or demystify the stigma and the stereotypes that are around women who choose not to have children. We have this really sexist way of thinking about women who choose not to have children. And it's that they are obsessed with their careers or unfeeling, you know, that they can't love in the same way. And it's just. That's nonsense. There are so many complex, nuanced reasons why a woman might make that decision. And I wanted to sort of make space for Rowan to have as much depth of feeling as any woman with a child. I wanted to show that she had the same capacity for love and nurture, because she is. She's so nurturing, she's so loving. She's a mother without kids. And, yeah, I want the book to save space for people who may not have children of their own, whether by choice or maybe because they. They can't, and to allow space for them to love other people's children or the planet with just as much generosity. You know, I think those. Those feelings are very, very valid and important.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

I'm glad you brought that up, because.

[Danielle Robay]

There is a sense in the book that, like, caring for plants, for seeds, for the future, is an act of faith. What does it mean to you to bring life into the world?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Whether it's.

[Danielle Robay]

Whether it's through parenthood or, you know.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Through growing a plant, whatever it is.

[Danielle Robay]

That you choose when you can't protect.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

That person or that thing or that animal from everything and potentially the worst.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is. I think about this a lot. You know, having two young kids in a time of immense change, I think is the main thing.

[Danielle Robay]

And.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

And certainly I think my work does have a preoccupation with wilderness, with the wilderness within us and beyond us, and how we grapple with climate change and what's happening to the world. And I think each book does that through a slightly different lens. The Migrations was about sorrow and sadness, both personal loss and species loss. Wolves once said wolves was about rage. It's about fury. I was so Angry about the way that I could see we were treating each other, particularly with violence against women, and also the way we're treating our wild creatures, specifically the slaughter of wolves. But this book, this book is about fear. It is about the fear of raising children in a time of ecological collapse and what it means for us, what are our responsibilities. It's hard to kind of get a bit of space from it and understand what we have to do each day. But there is so much beauty in finding those moments of nurture and life. Laughing with your children, working in a garden, planting something. These are all acts of love and those are the things that bring us hope. It's easy to kind of. I sit on the fence between optimism and pessimism all the time. I swing wildly between and it's really easy.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

I can tell in your writing.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

It's easy to get bogged down in the pessimism. But that's useless. That doesn't help anything or anyone. You know, I think what's helpful, what's useful, is being brave enough to find the hope. And not just hope. Hope has to lead us somewhere. The hope has to lead us to purpose, to action. It has to energize us or it's useless as well. So finding a way to let that sort of love and light and hope win is how we win.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Charlotte, I have a feeling you're going.

[Danielle Robay]

To be really good at this. We also play a game called Speed.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Read and we put 60 seconds on.

[Danielle Robay]

The clock and see how many rapid fire literary questions you can get through.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Are you ready?

[Danielle Robay]

Are you prepared?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

I'm ready. I'm ready.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Okay.

[Danielle Robay]

Three, two. What is one literary trope you would ban forever?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Love triangles. Boring.

[Danielle Robay]

What's one that you'll defend with your life?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Oh, I mean, I. I love an enemies to. To lovers. Love that.

[Danielle Robay]

Okay, your favorite literary landscape or environment?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

I love a stormy coastline. I love a stormy beach. Take me there, Take me there. Any, any, any book, any day.

[Danielle Robay]

What's your favorite book to recommend?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

I always recommend Hamnet. It's my favorite book. I love it so much.

[Danielle Robay]

What book do you wish you could read again for the first time?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Oh, I would love to read all of Claire Keegan's novels. She writes these really fabulous little novellas and they really hit you. You get to the. You're not sure what you're reading for a while and then you get to the end and they have this like sucker punch of power of the message that they're trying to convey. So that feeling is really satisfying. I'd love to have that again without. Without knowing it was coming.

[Danielle Robay]

What's a book that shaped the way you see the world?

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Felicity by Mary Oliver. So it's a book of poetry, and it is the most beautiful thing. I. I was reading it every day when I wrote Migrations because it was my sort of entry point to how to connect with nature, but also the. The peace and beauty that we get from nature. And she writes beautiful love poems as well. They're so profound.

[Danielle Robay]

Charlotte, thank you. I've heard people say that to make any film, but particularly an indie film, is basically a miracle. And I think to write a book the way that you have written Wild Darkshore is also basically a miracle. So huge congratulations to you, and I think a lot of people are really going to enjoy this, and you're gonna make people think.

[Charlotte McConaughey]

Thank you so much. It's been so lovely to chat with you, Danielle.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Okay, friends, before we wrap today's episode, I'm bringing back our monthly audiobook recommendation segment brought to you by Apple Books, called Turn up the Story. Apple Books editors are always reading and listening, so they can bring you the best new books every month, including brilliant new voices. This month, they're spotlighting debut novelists Olafunke, Grace Benkole. Her book, the Edge of Water, is a powerful, beautifully rendered portrait of a family struggling against misfortunes both big and small. The book is set between Nigeria and New Orleans and focuses on the paths of a mother and daughter. The mother, Esther, was forced to marry a man she didn't love, and she and her daughter, Aminah struggled to make their way. In a household scarred by violence and betrayal. Aminah grows up to have dreams of moving to America. And despite her mother's wishes, Aminah makes a new life for herself in New Orleans, only to have a disaster rob her of what she loves most. This is a story told in sensitive, careful detail with a cast of characters whose deeply personal desires always have the ring of truth, even when they go unsaid. It's a story of love and survival, richly colored by the culture of Nigeria's Yoruba people, a large West African ethnic group. The Edge of Water explores what it means to be part of a place, a people and a family. And I should tell you, the Edge of Water was selected as one of Apple Book's best debuts of the year. For a limited time, you can get the audiobook of the Edge of water for just $9.99 only on Apple Books. And if you're curious about what inspired Bancole to write this courageous debut, you'll find that too. Head to Apple Co Debutlistens to listen in. And while you're there, don't miss the full collection of debut audiobooks that the Apple Books editors love, all chosen with bookmarked listeners in mind. And if you want a little bit more from us, come hang with us on socials. We're at Reese's Book Club on Instagram serving up books, vibes and behind the scenes magic. And I'm Danielle Robay, R O B A Y Come say hi and DM me. And if you want to go 90s on us, you can call us. Okay, so our phone line is open, so call us now at 501-291-3379. That's 501-291-3379. Share your literary hot takes, your book recommendations. Ooh. Please share those and questions about the monthly pick. Or just let us know what you think about the episode you you just heard. And who knows, you might just hear yourself in our next episode. So don't be shy, give us a ring. And of course, make sure to follow Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. Until then, see you in the next chapter. Bookmarked is a production of Hello Sunshine and iHeart podcasts. It's executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and me, Danielle Robay. Production is by Acast Creative Studios. Our producers are Maddie Foley, Brittany Martinez and Sarah Schleed. Our production assistant is Avery Loftus. Jenny Kaplan and Emily Rutter are the executive producers for Acast Creative Studios. Maureen Polo and Reese Witherspoon are the executive producers for hello Sunshine. Olga Kaminwa, Sarah Kernerman, Kristin Perla and Ashley Rapoport are associate producers for Reese's Book Club. Ally Perry and Lauren Hanson are the executive producers for iHeart Podcast. Every reader knows the thrill of discovering.

[Danielle Robay]

A book that feels like it was.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Written just for you. On TikTok, that happens every day. Millions of people are recommending fantasy sagas, thrillers, romances, and hidden gems you might have missed. It's more than reviews, it's readers opening up about the stories that changed their lives. TikTok is where your next favorite book finds you in a warm and welcoming place. And with millions shaping what's trending in reading, Discovery feels endless. Join the community and start exploring stories on TikTok.

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Today's episode is brought to you by Cotton. We spend a lot of time with stories, hours curled up with dynamic plots and characters who feel like friends. What if the story isn't just in your hands but also in the world around you, in the fabric that's holding you close? Cotton is that timeless companion. Soft sheets for a lazy weekend morning with a book. Breezy dresses for afternoons spent reading in the backyard. It's the fabric that can be tossed in the wash without fuss. It's about ease, comfort and caring for yourself and the planet. Just like books we cherish, cotton leaves meaning into everyday moments. Next time you settle in for a chapter, slip into something cotton. Not just to read the story, but to feel it. Cotton the fabric of our lives. Learn more at thefabricofourlives.com@just roll they believe.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

The kitchen is where joy lives with their refrigerated dough. There's no fussy proofing, no hours of waiting. Just big smells, big smiles and that first irresistible flaky bite. They do the hard part so you could skip straight to the fun. Just Roll Puff Pastry is made with non GMO high quality ingredients ready to roll with parchment paper straight from the fridge. No thawing, no stress, just golden bakery worthy layers every single time. With Just Roll, every bake is simple. From savory show stopping appetizers to sweet dessert masterpieces, this is a fresh way to bake. Familiar but better. Find Just Roll Puff Pastry in the refrigerated section of your grocery store or visit justroll.com to find a store near you Apple Books is the best way.

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To read or listen to the books you love without a subscription right on.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Your iPhone and a heads up for listeners.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Apple Books is the official audiobook and ebook home for Reese's Book Club so you can discover every exciting pick plus author curated collections and more all in one place. Open the Apple Books app to explore a world of books and audiobooks. You can set and track your reading goals and get great recommendations for your.

[Reese's Book Club Host]

Next read or listen.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Again, no subscription required. Visit Apple Co Reese that's R E E S E Applebooks to find out more.

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[Danielle Robay]

This is an iHeart podcast.