Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

November Book Club

Book Club posts are for paid subscribers. A monthly subscription costs less than a bacon barm! Both are salty, and best served with a cup of tea. If you want to get into it about barmcakes/baps/rolls/cobs you’ll have to upgrade to comment (it’s not worth it). Huge thanks to my newest subscribers, I can’t wait to write for you. I’ll be back in the bookshop on Friday, and will send the next Receipt from the Bookshop at closing time, free for all subscribers. You can pre-order my book, Receipts from the Bookshop, here. Anyway, let’s Book Club because I have OPINIONS about this one.

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Well this was a cold and refreshing slap in the face (complimentary) after the confusion of last month. A mysterious story, but no mystery in what the author was trying to do here. Suspense, romance, drama, intrigue, shock and tragedy were all locked and loaded on this one, plus devastating ecological concerns, interesting facts about seeds, and an abundance of animals. I’m hard pressed to think of a reader who wouldn’t enjoy some aspect of this book. Nor is it too long or complicated to keep track of. An accessible and absolutely smashable read if you’ve got a few days to give over to it. I read it across nearly two weeks and I think I lost some of the momentum for it because of that, plus I was listening to Brideshead Revisited on Audible at the same time, which is unequivocally perfect. Wild Dark Shore would have been better served over a shorter time span, but that’s a minor quibble from my real world. It’s not McConaughy’s fault I was distracted by other things (Jeremy Irons). But, there is another but, and we’ll get to that…