The last migration - Charlotte McConaghy

'An extraordinary novel as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read' Emily St. John Mandel

A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive.

How far 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.

Charlotte McConaghy has been writing since childhood and has published a number of young adult books. She has both a Graduate Degree in Screenwriting and a Masters Degree in Screen Arts, and has worked in script development for film and television for several years. She lives in Sydney.

Though she grew up in Australia, McConaghy has always felt a connection to the UK, the home of her ancestors, and it was while roaming the Irish coastline that the idea for The Last Migration was born. It wasn't long before her passion for wildlife and her distress over the disastrous extinction crisis faced by the world today collided in the story of a woman's pursuit of the world's last birds.

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

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.
Guardian Australia - Fiona Wright

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

This novel is enchanting, but not in some safe, fairy-tale sense. Charlotte McConaghy has harnessed the rough magic that sears our souls. I recommend The Last Migration with my whole heart
Geraldine Brooks, Author of March

Powerful...Vibrant...Unique... If worry is the staple emotion that most climate fiction evokes in its readers, The Last Migration - the novelistic equivalent of an energizing cold plunge - flutters off into more expansive territory
Los Angeles Times

How far do we have to go to escape our pasts and find ourselves? Charlotte McConaghy's luminous, brilliant novel, set in a future when wildlife is rapidly becoming extinct, is indeed about loss-but what makes it miraculous is that it is also about both the glimpses of hope and the shattering persistence of love, if we are only brave enough to acknowledge them. Written in prose as gorgeous as the crystalline beauty of the Arctic, The Last Migration is deeply moving, haunting, and, yes, important
Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

A gutting portrait of a woman worn down by a world she never quite fit into
TIME

A lovely, haunting novel about a troubled woman's quest to follow the last surviving Arctic terns on their southerly migration. As she tries to make peace with the ghosts of her painful past, she must choose whether she herself wants - or deserves - to survive, in spite of everything she, and all humans, have destroyed and lost