Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy: Deep literary thriller
Migrations (aka The Last Migration) is Charlotte McConaghy’s bestselling, deeply moving, eco-aware, near-future dystopian literary thriller. Read my full review.
Migrations Publisher Synopsis
For readers of Station Eleven and Everything I Never Told You, a debut novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world’s last birds – and her own final chance for redemption.
A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive.
How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica.
As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny’s life begin to unspool. A daughter’s yearning search for her mother. An impulsive, passionate marriage. A shocking crime. Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards – and from.
Previously published as The Last Migration, this is a wild, gripping and deeply moving novel from a brilliant young writer. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, through crashing Atlantic swells to the bottom of the world, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic story of the possibility of hope against all odds.
Disclosure: If you click a link in this post we may earn a small commission to help offset our running costs.
My Review
Ever since being blown away by the level of intimacy and suspense Charlotte McConaghy cultivated with readers in her 2021 novel Once There Were Wolves, I have had this title, its standalone precursor, on my TBR pile. The tricky part was just finding some uninterrupted reading time for it, since I already knew that whenever I picked up Migrations I would not want to put it down again.
“Mam used to tell me to look for the clues.
“The clues to what?” I asked the first time.
“To life. They are hidden everywhere.”
Once again, reading McConaghy’s first-person narrative is a fully immersive and mesmerising experience. Her narrator Franny is both a magnetic and enigmatic character — one that is recklessly courageous and independent, endearingly passionate, yet emotionally fragile, traumatised and constantly in a state of fight-or-flight. She is both crusader and a metaphorical impending car crash — a combination hard to look away from.
“He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.”
Migrations‘ overarching dystopian world is eerily ours simply fast-forwarded to a near future when the climate change impacts scientists have long forecasted, such as raised sea levels and flora and fauna extinctions, have come to pass.
.
“Saving specific animals purely on the basis of what they offer humanity may be practical, but wasn’t this attitude the problem to begin with? Our overwhelming, annihilating selfishness?”
From the visceral brutality of Franny plunging into icy waters or being lashed by wind and salt spray as she clings to a boat deck in treacherous seas through to the sensory delicacy of her tentatively touching the feathers of a stuffed bird or silently crawling into a hidden cave to marvel at birds nesting, McConaghy’s scene depiction is mesmerising.
“A life’s impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.”
On one level, Migrations is a page-turning mystery adventure thriller played out on the grandest of stages (the world and its wildlife in peril), and on another, an intimate character study and literary psychological thriller. On both levels, McConaghy perceptively explores numerous challenging topics. The end result is an immensely thought-provoking novel that, despite the dark depths it plumbs, heroes resilience and redemption.
Due to the subject matter covered, Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations is by no means an easy read, but it is a deeply moving and memorable one that I highly recommend.
I now cannot wait to read this supremely talented author’s next literary fiction release, Wild Dark Shore, scheduled for publication in March 2025.
My Rating
Story 5 / 5 ; The Writing 5 / 5
Get your copy of Migrations (aka The Last Migration)
Compare Retailers >>Reading Update: She has now also released Wild Dark Shore (2025), another must-read.
More suspenseful literary fiction:
Click on book covers for full reviews of each novel.