Wild Dark Shore: The Stilt-House on the Vanishing Island

"A breathtaking debut of SUSPENSE, GRIEF, AND CHOSEN FAMILY that will undo you and rebuild you on the same page...I could not stop reading." - Mireille Hawthorne

"A FIERCELY GIFTED new voice." - Tomas Aldering

"Absolutely DEVASTATING. Berlanga writes the small dark hours like no one else." - Saskia Vrey

"SPELLBINDING...Exceptionally tender, ferociously alive." - Linnea Korhonen

"My absolute FAVORITE book of the year." - Wren Falkenberg

A grieving surgeon. Two children in hiding. A vanishing island where the tide takes everything back.

Dr. Hanne Voss is a trauma surgeon who has forgotten how to make decisions. Fourteen months after losing her husband, she takes a winter caretaker post on Halligen M llesand, a tiny marsh island in the German Wadden Sea that disappears under the sea twice a day. Her only home will be the Pfahlhaus Sturmvogel, a 1950s research station built on six wooden stilts above the salt marsh. She expects six months of silence. She finds the silence already broken.

Seventeen-year-old Jonas and his fourteen-year-old sister Emi have been hiding in the stilt-house for twelve days. Jonas has been protecting Emi for two and a half years. Emi has not spoken aloud in fourteen months. The man they are running from is a respected Hamburg pediatric dentist, a church deacon - a man whose forty-year public face has hidden what he has done to every child placed in his care.

Hanne could call the police. She doesn't. Across an autumn of migrating geese, storm-season floods the locals call Landunter, and the gathering threat of a man who is closing in by lorry and by tide, four strangers - a surgeon, a boy, a silent girl, and the old ranger who is the last full-time resident of the hallig - begin to become something none of them have been allowed to be in years. A family.

But Jonas is only forty-seven days from his eighteenth birthday. The man hunting them knows the calendar. And when he arrives at the stilt-house on a Tuesday morning with paperwork and a smile he has practiced for forty years, the next tide is already closing the only way home.

A novel of breathtaking atmosphere, ferocious tenderness, and a final dark hour readers will not forget, Wild Dark Shore is about the families we are given, the families we make, and the small impossible choices in which we choose them.