Migrations

The world's wild places are nearly empty: the birds, the fish, the animals almost all gone. Franny Stone arrives in Greenland with her research gear and a singular, half-mad purpose—to follow the last Arctic terns on Earth as they make what may be their final migration to Antarctica. Her expedition cancelled, she talks her way onto the Saghani, a fishing boat with a curmudgeonly captain and a weary crew, promising them one last great haul if they'll chase the birds south.

As the Saghani sails toward the ice, Franny's past surfaces in fragments—a passionate marriage, an absent family, a wandering life shaped by abandonment, and a crime she is both fleeing and steering toward. Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is a devastating, crystalline work of climate fiction and character study, equal parts grief and hope, about extinction, love, and the compulsion to keep moving.