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A new novel from a brilliant young writer.
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.
The Last Migration 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.
"The Last Migration is as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read. This is an extraordinary novel by a wildly talented writer"
– Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
"There's a brooding lushness to this novel's prose that belies its stark premise [...] this keening lament of an adventure is compelling."
– Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
"An adventure of a wilder sort"
– Vogue US
"The Last Migration is a wonder. I read it in a gasp. There is hope in these pages; a balm for these troubled times. McConaghy's words cut through to the bone I'm a sucker for a complicated narrator, and Franny Stone might be the queen of them all. In this tantalizingly beautiful epic, Franny's life has been marked by secrets and loss, and so she turns to where she cannot reach: the skies"
– Elle US
"Gripping, tender and beautifully done. This novel is as intimate as it is urgent – you emerge thrilled and dazed, but also galvanized to save the planet"
– Anna Funder, author of Stasiland
"Visceral and haunting [...] This novel's prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet's landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates [...] The Last Migration is a nervy and well-crafted novel, one that lingers long after its voyage is over"
– The New York Times Book Review
"Dreamy, elegiac [...] both an adventure story and a piece of speculative climate fiction, constantly slipping between a kind of literary realism and more magical elements, between moments of domestic drama and sweeping epic [...] an aching and poignant book, and one that's pressing in its timeliness [...] It's also a book about love, about trying to understand and accept the creatureliness that exists within our selves, and what it means to be a human animal, that we might better accommodate our own wildness within the world."
– Fiona Wright, Guardian Australia
"Gutting and gorgeous, The Last Migration is an astounding meditation on love, trauma, and the cost of survival. With soulful prose and deep empathy, Charlotte McConaghy weaves parallel stories of a woman and a world on the brink of devastation, but never without hope. Equal parts love letter and dirge, this is a true force of a book that I read holding my breath from its start to its symphonic finish"
– Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild
"At a time when it feels like we're at the end of the world, this novel about a different kind of end of the world serves as both catharsis and escape"
– Harper's Bazaar US
