Migrations

A Novel

by Charlotte McConaghy

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.

Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org

*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

Pub Date Aug 04 2020 | Archive Date Dec 15 2020

Women's Fiction

Talking about this book? Use #Migrations #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!

Description

"Migrations 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

For readers of Flight Behavior and Station Eleven, a novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world’s last birds—and her own final chance for redemption.

Franny Stone has always been a wanderer. By following the ocean’s tides and the birds that soar above, she can forget the losses that have haunted her life. But when the wild she loves begins to disappear, Franny can no longer wander without a destination. She arrives in remote Greenland with one purpose: to find the world’s last flock of Arctic terns and follow them on their final migration. She convinces Ennis Malone, captain of the Saghani, to take her onboard, winning over his eccentric crew with promises that the birds she is tracking will lead them to fish.

As the Saghani fights its way south, Franny’s new shipmates begin to realize that she is full of dark secrets: night terrors, an unsent pile of letters, and an obsession with pursuing the terns at any cost. When the story of her past begins to unspool, Ennis and his crew must ask themselves what Franny is really running toward—and running from.

Propelled by a narrator as fierce and fragile as the terns she is following, Migrations is both an ode to our threatened world and a breathtaking page-turner about the lengths we will go for the people we love.

Advance Praise

A Most Anticipated Book (Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Library Journal)

"Migrations 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

"[A] tantalizingly beautiful epic."

—Elle

“[A] significant work of environmentally informed literature, both lushly written and heartbreaking.”

—Library Journal

"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

“At times devastating and, at others, surprisingly, undeniably hopeful…Brimming with stunning imagery and raw emotion, Migrations is the incredible story of personal redemption, self-forgiveness and hope for the future in the face of a world on the brink of collapse.”

—Shelf Awareness

“An astounding meditation on love, trauma, and the cost of survival. With soulful prose and deep empathy, McConaghy weaves parallel stories of a woman and a world on the brink of devastation, but never without hope. 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

“Set in a future when wildlife is rapidly becoming extinct, Migrations 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, Migrations is deeply moving, haunting, and, yes, important.”

—Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World

A Most Anticipated Book (Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Library Journal)

"Migrations is as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read. This is an extraordinary novel by a wildly talented...