Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

This is a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection, and I am slowly but surely reading quite a few of them--she has a penchant for thrillers, which I do not share, but this one is sort of borderline in that category. It is set in the near future in a remote place that is largely uninhabited. As a result the characters only interact with each other, because there is no one else there. Dominic Salt and his three children live at Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica that is disappearing because of climate change and rising oceans. Here is the world’s largest seed bank, and while Shearwater was once full of researchers, it’s now just the Salts. And soon they will be leaving as well--largely abandoing the seeds they put there to preserve them for the future. But everything changes when, after a terrible storm, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. The Salts help nurse the woman, Rowan, back to health. And while the family is used to being on their own, they start to form a connection with Rowen. They all have secrets that gradually reveal themselves, and while this sort of literary thriller is not my usual fare, I enjoyed this.