1 Books Like Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A family living on a remote island near Antarctica. A mysterious woman who washes ashore with no explanation. Sabotaged radios. Charlotte McConaghy sets up an isolation thriller that mirrors the claustrophobia of Project Hail Mary's spaceship, except the vacuum outside is replaced by freezing ocean and the unknown threat is human rather than cosmic. The problem-solving here is social rather than scientific: figuring out who to trust when trust might get you killed. McConaghy writes landscape and weather the way Weir writes physics, with a precision that makes you feel the cold in your bones. This is a slower burn than Hail Mary, but the tension builds to the same kind of breaking point.

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon. Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together. A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.