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

Hi, I'm Danielle Robe.

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's 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.

This book is about fear.

It is about the fear of raising children in a time of ecological collapse.

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.

Set on a remote island at the edge of the world, Wild Dark Shore is part climate thriller, part literary love story.

It's filled with mystery, arrivals, sabotage, 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 mcconachie 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.

Thank you, thank you so much.

Actually, i'd rather say welcome back to 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?

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.

When you say this stuff, you mean climate change.

Yeah, yeah, so exactly.

Yeah, the major kind of ecological shifts that we're about to sort of start experiencing on a much more 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, 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 yet mothers who are just feeling like, Okay, I don't even know where to start with all of this.

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, but the plot of the book is really more about a father.

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 emphasizing 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 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, 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 mother 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 sort of incredible mother to these children.

To this Yeah, in particular, I think and women can kind of recognize that that's sacrifice, and that's also just a human thing.

That's not a mother thing.

It's a human thing.

We are very good at sacrificing ourselves for children.

I think you make a really good point that I didn't think about until you just said it.

I'm not a parent yet.

I hope to be a mom one day, and reading your book, it was really 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, but thinking five twenty or one hundred years 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.

Oh wow, that's a good question.

I think.

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.

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

Like from reading 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 a 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 keeps 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, do you try and grab people with an insane opening line, because I think you're a master at it.

You take a line that just drops you into the story right away.

If I can share a few with people.

The animals are dying soon, we will be here alone.

Another is when we were eight, Dad cut me open from throat to stomach.

Oh my god, 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 interests 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.

I had a friend on the podcast named Chelsea Devontees 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?

Yeah?

Definitely, I mean I think the ending is so.

So deeply linked to the beginning.

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 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 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.

I want to start from the very beginning of Wild Dark Shore.

You're right, 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?

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 pointing to a lot of somatic things in the book.

So the story takes place on an Arctic island called Sheerwater, and obviously the climate in the weather is really harsh.

There's violent storms, there's howling winds, and this constant threat of rising sea levels and permafrost.

Tha why make a family saga happen in a place that is so hostile to human survival?

Well, for starters, because what a great story it makes.

We love survival stories.

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 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 given them life and joy and connection to each other.

But it's also a place that started to become dangerous.

And 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 yeah, dangerous, thrilling, exciting.

Did you think of the water as a character itself, like the shoreline or the coastline.

Yeah.

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 Fenn, 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 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 speech 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 place where you can't escape anything, any inner turmoil, you know, it is.

It really brings to life all the issues that they would rather keep silent.

So glad that you mentioned Fan 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 in 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 book as a mood board with textures and sounds and smell, what would it be If you could give me three textures, two sounds, and one smell.

Oh gosh, okay textures.

The textures would be.

Sharp rocks, soft moss maybe, or like soft tussock grass and wet rain missed maybe they would be the textures or like even this coarse s I don't know what was the next.

What was the next?

One to two sounds and one smell?

Sounds, so the sounds would be the wind and the bird sounds, So the sound of this place is extraordinary, and it was.

This was my experience of arriving on mcquarie 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.

It just kind of 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, Yeah, it's so funny.

I've actually had this.

People have brought this up with me before, about the smell of seals.

That's funny.

I'm not the only one.

No, But you know, this was not.

I don't have any recollection of finding them smelly.

I don't know what it was, yeah, 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 strangeness of it that I didn't notice.

So a smell.

Maybe that salt smell of ocean.

And I think in that too.

Yeah, I think it's salt.

I love salty smell, and I had a lot of moments in the story where Rowan and Don 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.

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 its seeds for any plant in the world that you can think of 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.

Yeah, this is wild.

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?

That's right, yes, very much so.

Yeah, seed banks are real.

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 Spalbard, and it actually houses agricultural seeds, so anyone in any country in the world, it's like a bank.

You send your seeds there for safe keeping.

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 agrocoltrual 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 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 Allly 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, human's probably going to be okay, maybe we should be saving this strange, the unusual and the beautiful things that exist in their own right purely because they exist.

And yes, the island Shearwater is based on McQuary Island, which is a real sub Antarctic island halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica.

How many people work there.

There's a science base that houses I think it's about twenty 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 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 hadn't planned to go to McCrary because it's quite difficult to get there, only one boat that goes at one time of year.

But I just realized I had to do this.

Unfortunately, I had just had a baby, so he was coming with me.

Your baby came with you, 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.

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 mm hmm, it's a very wild ocean.

In the lead up to this trip, I was having sleepless nights just seeking 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 home.

He's like, it'll be fine, relax.

Did he come with you easy?

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.

Cool.

Yeah, sorry, 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 missshrouded, 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, as 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 eighteen hundreds.

Sealers and whalers just went down in droves.

They were wiping out the animals.

A whole species of fur seal went extinct.

All the penguins nearly gone.

They were hurting them into these huge, rusting metal barrels to squeeze them for the 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 so 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 haunted novel.

It's a Gothic romantic mystery about a family haunted by ghosts on an island haunted by ghosts.

So, yeah, the troop was just incredible.

It changed everything for me.

Charlotte.

Every week I ask our guests what they've bookmarked this week.

It can be a quote, a palm, something you've saved on Instagram.

What have you bookmarked?

I've been reading What We Can Know by Ian McEwen.

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.

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 still curious which relationship and the book changed the most between the first draft and the final.

Yeah, it was.

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 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 Roland's point of view.

But I was really missing getting inside the heads 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.

So 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 it's this book needed to be quiet.

Charlotte.

How many years did it take you to write there?

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 mcquarie 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.

And then I got heels 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 own body, your own eyes, changed everything, I think is such a point of inspiration.

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 two 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 how we inhabit.

So yeah, bringing the world to life really brought the whole thing to life, and it brought the characters to life for me as well.

Suddenly realizing this place that they were in really kind of grounded me and 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, Allly 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 Fenn and Raf 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.

Do you think for attention because Orley was kind of like the unbridled optimism, yes, and so what were you trying to what was your editor trying to add back in?

I think she felt like if they if they're going to 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 going to move into their minds.

Which we do.

They need their own struggles, their own transformations, their own plots in a way.

So and they had a little 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 there's a sequence where fans 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 she's the one that is most concerned about that, and there's a 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 that was all new.

You know, that came in after the first draft, and I think the book's allure for it.

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 position we don't hear very often, especially written about in fiction.

What were you wanting to explore with Rowan when it came to parenthood.

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 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 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, weather by choice or maybe because they can't, and to allow space for them to love other people's children all the planet with just as much generosity.

You know.

I think those feelings are very, very valid and important.

I'm glad you brought that up, because 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, whether it's through parenthood or you know, growing a plant, whatever it is that you choose when you can't protect that person or that thing or that animal from everything and potentially the worst.

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.

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 Swansea 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, swing wildly between you, and it's really it's easy to get bogged down in the pessimism, but it'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.

Charlotte, I have a feeling you're going to be really good at this.

We also play a game called speed Read, and we put sixty seconds on the clock and see how many rapid fire literary questions you can get through.

Are you ready?

Are you prepared?

I'm ready?

I'm ready.

Three?

Two?

What is one literary trope you would ban forever?

Love triangles, borro?

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

Oh?

I mean I love an enemy's to lovers?

Love that?

Okay?

Your favorite literary landscape or environment.

I love a stormy coastline.

I love a stormy beach.

Take me there, Take me there, any any book any day.

What's your favorite book to recommend?

I always recommend Hamlett.

It's my favorite book.

I love it so much.

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

Ooh, 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 knowing it was coming.

What's a book that she The Way You See the World?

Felicity by Mary Oliver So.

It's a book of poetry and it is the most beautiful thing.

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 peace and beauty that we get from nature.

And she writes beautiful poems as well, and they're so profound.

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 Dark Shore 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 going to make people think.

Thank you so much.

It's been so lovely to chat with you, Daniel.

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, their spotlighting debut novelist Olafunke Grace Bencole.

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 Amina struggled to make their way in a household scarred by violence and betrayal.

Amina grows up to have dreams of moving to America, and despite her mother's wishes, Amina makes a new life for herself in New Orleans, only to have a disaster rob her of what she loves most.

This is a already 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 Applebook's Best Debuts of the Year.

For a limited time.

You can get the audiobook of the Edge of Water for just nine to ninety nine only on Apple Books.

And if you're curious about what inspired Bancoli to write this courageous debut, you'll find that too.

Head to Apple dot co slash Debut Listens 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 Robe, Rob a y, come say hi and DM me and if you want to go nineties on us, you can call us.

Okay, so our phone line is open, So call us now at five zero one two nine one three three seven nine.

That's five zero one two nine one three three seven nine.

Share your literary hot takes, your book recommendations, oh please share those, and questions about the monthly pick, or just let us know what you think about the episode 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 force by Reese Witherspoon and Me Danielle Robe.

Production is by Acast Creative Studios.

Our producers are Matty Foley, Britney Martinez and Sarah Schleid.

Our production assistant is Avery Loftis.

Jenny Kaplan and Emily Rudder are the executive producers for a Cast Creative Studios.

Maureene Polo and Reese Witherspoon are the executive producers for Hello Sunshine.

Olga Kaminwha, Sarah Kernerman, Kristin Perla and Ashley Rappaport are associate producers for Reese's book Club.

Ali Perry and Lauren Hanson are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts.