Just as there are seasons to the writing life, so there are seasons in the life of a reader. Some seasons call for voracious pacing, hunkering down on the couch, and reading until you’re half blind. Others call for a gentler, steadier approach — for leisurely walks through the library and the bookstore, looking for the right book, and reading and rereading all your old favorites.

September was that latter kind of time for me. I read little that was new, returning to some favorite selections of W.S. Merwin and to Christian Wiman’s “Once in the West” for a much-needed reread. I also made what is becoming an annual autumn pilgrimage back to the pages of John Knowles, whose “A Separate Peace” is, on most days, my favorite novel.

But I did find time for one new novel, Charlotte McConaghy’s “Wild Dark Shore,” and one new book of poetry, Jane Hirshfield’s “Ledger.”

My grandfather was an avid amateur photographer. For many years, he kept a folder on his desktop titled “photos I wish I’d taken.”

That’s how I felt reading “Wild Dark Shore.”

McConaghy’s novel does everything I wish to be able to do in a novel. It has this gripping central storyline that drives the novel toward its climax, but nothing is sacrificed along the way. Not the characters, who are each drawn tenderly and realistically. Not the tension between hope and despair. Not the piercing reminders of a beautiful and dying world.

To draw a world and people that richly without sacrificing a riveting plot is a rare feat, and one I can’t help but admire.

My one gripe, if I had to have one, is the time and space given to the main character’s debate about whether she wants to have children.

While that debate works as a pretty functional stand-in for her flickers between hope for the future and a kind of nihilism, it seems to reduce the myriad reasons a woman might not want children to the one big existential one.

At the end of the day, though, this is a book well worth reading. For readers of the novels of the past that have contended with the great evils of their own times, it will feel both fresh and painfully familiar.