- Jul 15
- 11 min read
Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, published in Australia as The Last Migration, is a novel of immense distances: the span between Greenland and Antarctica, the divide between human beings and the natural world, and the emotional gulf separating grief from acceptance.
At its centre is Franny Stone, a woman driven by an almost physical need to keep moving. She's crossed countries, abandoned homes and repeatedly left the people she loves, but her latest journey is different. Believing that the Arctic terns may be undertaking their final migration, Franny travels to Greenland and attaches tracking devices to three of the birds. She intends to follow them south to Antarctica, where she'll fulfil a promise connected to her husband Niall.
The world through which she travels is frighteningly recognisable. Climate change, industrial exploitation and mass extinction have stripped the planet of much of its wildlife. Entire species have disappeared. The oceans have been fished almost empty. Governments are finally introducing desperate restrictions, but their intervention has come after generations of damage.
Franny persuades Ennis Malone, captain of the fishing vessel Saghani, to take her aboard. Her proposal is both practical and morally uncomfortable: the terns will lead the fishermen towards whatever fish remain.
What follows is part maritime adventure, part psychological mystery, part love story and part ecological lament. It's also an examination of whether a person can accept responsibility for devastating harm without deciding that death is the only punishment severe enough.
A Woman Who Cannot Stay
Franny is one of the novel’s greatest strengths because she refuses to fit comfortably into familiar categories.
She's fearless but not emotionally strong. She's deeply loving yet repeatedly abandons those who depend upon her. She is compassionate towards animals and strangers while capable of causing irreversible harm. She saves lives with the same instinct that makes her willing to throw her own away.
From childhood, Franny has experienced what she calls “itchy feet”—a compulsion to wander beyond boundaries and resist anything that resembles permanent settlement. She understands herself through migratory birds, particularly the Arctic terns whose lives are shaped by instinctive movement between opposite ends of the Earth.
Her wandering initially appears to be an essential and almost romantic wildness. As the novel unfolds, however, movement becomes inseparable from trauma. Franny doesn't only travel towards new places. She uses physical distance to escape memories she can't bear to examine.
She leaves before she can be abandoned. She runs before another person can depend too heavily upon her. She treats movement as freedom because remaining still would require her to remember.
The brilliance of Franny’s character lies in this contradiction. Her wildness is neither a defect to be corrected nor an uncomplicated source of liberation. It gives her extraordinary courage and a profound connection to nature, but it also becomes an excuse through which she avoids responsibility.
McConaghy allows Franny to be difficult, reckless and morally compromised without denying her humanity. The novel doesn't ask readers to approve of everything she does. It asks whether we can understand a person without absolving her.
Love Without Ownership
Franny’s relationship with her husband Niall provides the emotional core of the novel.
Niall is an ornithologist whose scientific understanding of migratory birds shapes the way he loves Franny. He recognises that movement is part of her nature and doesn't attempt to turn her into a more conventional partner. He waits for her. He searches for her. He trusts that leaving doesn't always mean that love has ended.
This acceptance is deeply moving, but the novel doesn't pretend that it costs him nothing.
Franny’s disappearances leave Niall frightened and emotionally exhausted. His willingness to love her without controlling her eventually reaches its limit, particularly after the stillbirth of their daughter and Franny’s prolonged absence during their shared grief.
Niall’s final decision regarding their marriage isn't a failure to love her. It's an acknowledgement that love can't require one person to absorb unlimited pain.
This delineation is central to Migrations. McConaghy repeatedly contrasts love with possession. The novel is filled with people who capture, confine or destroy the things they claim to cherish. Exotic birds are kept in ornamental cages. Endangered animals are imprisoned in the name of preservation. The sea is exploited by those who consider it their home.
Niall offers another possibility: to love without demanding ownership. Yet Franny can't grant him the same freedom. When confronted with the possibility of losing him, she reacts with catastrophic desperation. The tragedy at the heart of the novel emerges from this imbalance. Niall can release what he loves. Franny believes she can't survive its departure.
A Climate Novel That Centres the Animals
The near-future world of Migrations is devastated by environmental collapse, but McConaghy doesn't spend pages explaining political systems, technologies or the precise sequence of events that caused it. Instead, the crisis is revealed through absence.
There are no animals where animals once lived. Landscapes that should be filled with movement have become empty. News of another extinction arrives with the terrible regularity of a weather report.
This gives the novel’s environmental message a strong emotional force. Extinction isn't presented solely as a scientific emergency or a threat to human resources. It's shown as the removal of relationship from the world.
McConaghy challenges the assumption that animals deserve protection only when they're useful to humanity. Within the novel’s conservation programme, species necessary for pollination and human food production receive priority. Other animals are confined or encouraged to abandon behaviours that have evolved over millions of years.Franny and Niall reject this approach. For them, an animal’s life has value beyond its contribution to human survival.
The novel’s position is intentionally confrontational. It asks whether conservation can remain ethical when it continues to place humanity at the centre of every decision. Are we preserving other species for their sake or because we're frightened of what their disappearance will mean for us?
This is where Migrations becomes more than a novel about climate change. It's a critique of human entitlement: our habit of assuming that the planet’s living creatures exist as resources, possessions, symbols or instruments of our own survival.
The Arctic Terns
The Arctic terns are both real animals and the novel’s central symbol.
Their annual migration is one of the longest known journeys undertaken by any creature. Travelling between Arctic breeding grounds and Antarctic waters, they spend much of their lives in motion.
Franny identifies with them instinctively. Niall understands them scientifically. Their shared fascination with the birds becomes a language through which they understand each other.
The terns also represent a form of belonging that Franny has failed to recognise. They travel enormous distances, but they're not necessarily alone. Their lives contain movement and return, instinct and community.
Franny has mistaken freedom for isolation. The terns suggest that she doesn't need to remain permanently in one place to belong somewhere. She needs to find those capable of travelling beside her.
Her mission to follow them is also bound to Niall. She places the burden of hope upon their survival because she hasn't accepted his death. As long as the birds continue flying, some part of her can believe that what she has lost remains retrievable.
The point at which she releases the terns from the obligation to survive for her is one of the most important moments in the novel. It marks the beginning of a less possessive form of love—one that doesn't demand that another living thing endure merely to ease her grief.
The Sea as Refuge and Threat
The ocean is never merely a setting in Migrations. It's Franny’s refuge, temptation, mirror and potential grave.
She feels most alive in water, particularly when it is cold, violent or dangerous. The ocean offers freedom from the fixed responsibilities of land. Nothing remains still. Nothing can be permanently claimed. It's also where Franny repeatedly moves towards death.
Her instinct to rescue others is tangled with her willingness to drown. She dives into dangerous water before considering whether she might survive. Her courage is genuine, but it's intensified by her belief that her own life is expendable.
This makes the novel’s final immersion especially powerful. Franny enters the Antarctic sea carrying everything she's lost and intending not to return. Her emergence isn't a miraculous erasure of guilt. It's a decision that guilt doesn't relieve her of the responsibility to remain alive.
The ocean doesn't forgive her. Nature doesn't deliver a moral judgement. It simply continues to exist beyond the scale of her individual tragedy.
Ennis Malone and the Final Catch
Ennis Malone initially resembles a contemporary Captain Ahab.
He's obsessed with finding one final enormous catch in an ocean that's been almost emptied. Fishing isn't merely his profession. It's his inheritance, identity and proof that his life has meaning.
His pursuit places the crew in danger and positions him as another human being attempting to impose his will upon nature. However, Ennis is given the capacity to change.
By the time he and Franny encounter a surviving abundance of fish, whales and birds, he no longer wants to capture anything. The discovery that the ocean is still alive becomes more valuable than ownership of what it contains. This is one of the novel’s clearest expressions of hope. Ennis doesn't abandon his identity or cease to love the sea. He learns to love it without needing to extract something from it.
The relationship between Franny and Ennis is equally effective because McConaghy doesn't force it into a conventional romance. Their bond is based on recognition. Both understand compulsion, abandonment and the difficulty of reconciling freedom with responsibility.
Ennis gives Franny something she's rarely experienced: acceptance within a community that doesn't require domestic permanence. When the crew tells her that she's one of them, belonging is separated from stillness for the first time.
Trauma and the Unreliable Narrator
The nonlinear structure of Migrations is carefully designed to keep Franny’s past partially hidden.
The narrative moves between the voyage aboard the Saghani, Franny’s childhood, her marriage to Niall and fragmented scenes involving police stations, hospitals and prison. Letters addressed to Niall are woven throughout, initially encouraging the assumption that he's alive and waiting elsewhere.
Franny isn't unreliable because she's consciously attempting to deceive the reader. Her memory has fractured around experiences she cannot psychologically contain.
The truth arrives in stages:
Her mother didn't simply abandon her.
Her daughter didn't survive.
Her marriage ended in tragedy.
Niall isn't waiting for her return.
Each revelation forces the reader to reinterpret what came before, just as Franny must reconstruct her own life.
This structure gives the novel considerable momentum, although it occasionally feels engineered for emotional effect. McConaghy has placed an enormous amount of tragedy into Franny’s history, and there are moments when the accumulation becomes almost overwhelming.
Suicide, stillbirth, murder, imprisonment, assault, ecological collapse and repeated attempts at self-destruction all converge within one character’s life. The intensity is purposeful, but it sometimes threatens to make suffering feel like a mechanism for delivering the next revelation.
Even so, the fractured chronology suits Franny. Her life can't be told in a clean line because she hasn't experienced it that way.
Where the Novel Is Less Convincing
The emotional and symbolic ambition of Migrations is also the source of its weaknesses.
The imagery can become heavy-handed. Birds represent freedom. Cages represent possession. Water represents both life and death. Storms arrive alongside emotional turmoil. These connections are effective, but McConaghy occasionally presses them beyond the point of subtlety.
The speculative world is also more suggestive than fully developed. The scale of the ecological collapse is enormous, yet the surrounding social and political systems remain lightly sketched. The novel is far more interested in the emotional meaning of extinction than in the practical construction of its near-future world.
The treatment of Franny’s guilt raises another difficulty. The narrative devotes enormous attention to Niall’s death and Franny’s need for self-forgiveness, but the other woman killed in the collision receives far less consideration.
That absence matters because Franny’s redemption cannot concern only the husband she loved. An innocent stranger also died, leaving behind a life and relationships the novel barely explores.
This doesn't invalidate Franny’s journey, but it complicates the emotional resolution. Her decision to live is necessary. Whether the novel gives sufficient attention to accountability beyond her own suffering is more debatable.
The final discovery of a thriving ecosystem offers a beautiful release after so much devastation, although it may feel more consoling than entirely credible. Nature’s resilience provides hope, but the surviving wildlife can also appear to resolve the novel’s despair with a conveniently timed miracle.
An Ecological Elegy With a Pulse of Hope
Despite these reservations, Migrations is an emotionally potent and intellectually engaging novel.
McConaghy combines the propulsive danger of a sea journey with an intimate portrait of traumatic grief. The environmental crisis never feels like decorative world-building. It deepens the story’s questions about loss, possession and responsibility.
The novel’s most compelling idea is that despair can become another form of abandonment. Franny believes that death is the only honest response to what she's done and what humanity has done to the planet. Her final realisation isn't that everything will recover or that she deserves uncomplicated forgiveness. It's that the continued existence of wildness creates an obligation to remain.
Hope here isn't confidence that humanity will repair all the damage it's caused. It's the refusal to treat devastation as permission to stop caring.
Franny survives without becoming tame. She's not transformed into a person who can settle comfortably into a conventional life. Instead, she begins to understand that love doesn't always demand stillness and that migration doesn't have to mean permanent escape.
The Arctic terns offer her another way to live: move when movement is necessary, return when return is possible and don't confuse freedom with being alone.
Final Thoughts
Migrations is a sweeping climate-fiction novel with the emotional intimacy of a grief story and the tension of a maritime adventure.
Its symbolism is sometimes insistent and its accumulation of tragedy can feel excessive, but McConaghy’s central questions are difficult to dismiss:
How do we love without possessing?
Can we accept responsibility without surrendering to self-destruction?
What does humanity owe the other creatures with whom we share the planet?
And when so much has already been lost, is hope still an ethical choice?
The answers aren't simple. That's precisely why Franny’s journey remains so affecting. She doesn't reach Antarctica and discover that the world's been saved. She discovers that life persists without requiring her permission, and that persistence asks something of her in return.
Book Details
Migrations — Charlotte McConaghy
Paperback ISBN
978-1250204035 (Flatiron Books US trade paperback edition)
978-1760893323 (Penguin Australia paperback edition)
Hardcover ISBN
978-1250204028 (Flatiron Books US hardcover edition)
eBook ISBN
978-1250204011 (Flatiron Books eBook edition)
Genre
Literary Fiction; Climate Fiction; Speculative Fiction
Subgenre
Ecofiction; Dystopian Fiction; Maritime Fiction; Psychological Fiction; Literary Adventure; Environmental Fiction
Tropes / Literary Threads
Climate crisis; mass extinction; unreliable narrator; nonlinear narrative; fragmented memory; grief and trauma; self-forgiveness; redemption; migration; sea voyage; survival; environmental conservation; humanity versus nature; love without possession.
Publisher
Flatiron Books — Macmillan (United States)
Penguin — Penguin Random House Australia (Australia)
Series
Standalone Novel
Series Order
N/A
Formats Available
Hardcover; Trade Paperback; eBook; Digital Audiobook
Audiobook Narrator
Barrie Kreinik
Australian Release Date
4 August 2020 — originally published in Australia as The Last Migration
30 March 2021 — Australian paperback reissued under the title Migrations
Page Count
272 pages (Flatiron Books hardcover and Penguin Australia paperback editions)
288 pages (Flatiron Books US trade paperback edition)
Where to Buy Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
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Danielle Robinson is a literary critic and writer whose work explores literature through the lens of atmosphere, memory, culture, and emotional experience. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she combines academic insight with a deeply refined aesthetic sensibility shaped by more than three decades working across the creative industries as an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist, fashion stylist, and interior stager.
She reads widely and rigorously, reading and reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through Silk & Sentences, Danielle approaches literature as something immersive and lived with — not simply stories to consume, but works that shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
She writes from her semi-rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, their dogs Oscar and Paige, and an ever-growing library of books.
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