Migrations

Staff Top Fives 2020-2021

Our favorite books of 2020-2021.

Follow the thrilling (and, yes, sometimes painful) story of Franny Stone as she throws herself into the frigid North Atlantic while tracking the last migration of Arctic terns. Why is it the last? Why do you think? Why is Franny using near-superpowers in pursuit of her goal? Wouldn't you? This book is a beautiful and disturbing allegory about the impending fate of our planet. Recommended By Peter N., Powells.com

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 will is a powerful thing, and mine has been called terrible.

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 so 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 salty, 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 the beguiling scientist in their midst is not who she seems. Battered by night terrors, accumulating a pile of unsent letters to her husband, and dead set on following the terns at any cost, Franny is full of dark secrets. 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 an unreliable narrator as fierce and fragile as the terns she is following, Migrations is a shatteringly beautiful ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened. But at its heart, it is about the lengths we will go, to the very edges of the world, for the people we love.

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

Charlotte McConaghy is an author and screenwriter based in Sydney, Australia. Migrations is her U.S. debut.