*spoilers ahead*


Set in a future world where several animal species have gone extinct, Migrations follows Franny Stone’s journey as she negotiates for a spot on a fishing vessel, in hopes of tracking the last of the Arctic terns to Antarctica on their last migration. Amidst their journey from Greenland to Antarctica, Franny’s history unspools from alternating timelines to form a galvanizing tale of love, loneliness, and loss.

This is one of those novels where if you get it, you really get it. From the initial pages, you gather the sense that Franny is grieving—at first, over the deteriorating state of the natural world, then later, because of inarticulate personal traumas. Yet, by the end of the story, these two aspects of her pain become intertwined so greatly that they become a singular entity exceeding what words can describe. Perhaps this is why when she wanders—whether consciously, or through her sleepwalking tendencies—she does so without aim or reason. It is purely instinctual, the way that migration seems to be for birds.

Within Franny’s impulse to track the Arctic terns is also her determination to meet their same fate; while not explicitly stated, Franny is on a suicide mission. This speaks to the intrinsic suffering that comes with the quality of being alive: death is inevitable; time is always passing. What, then, the novel seems to ask, is the purpose of life?


“It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.”


The human-inflicted violences being committed to the natural world affect Franny profoundly, a quality she shares with her husband Niall, a professor at the University of Galway. They are compatible due to their shared love for birds, but they are opposites in almost every other way. Where she is reserved and often pessimistic, he is open and consistently patient. In one of their first moments together, they observe a preserved specimen of a dead gull; Franny is unnerved by the life that has left it, yet Niall registers how beautiful it looks, even in death. She believes in strict dichotomies: alive versus dead, good versus bad. He serves as the gray-area voice of optimism. Eventually, it is his unwavering hope for a better world that makes Franny realize what the metaphorical destination she wanders toward is: a state of living in which she isn’t so ashamed of herself or her mistakes. Despite all that she’s lost, there is so much yet to live for—this epiphany lends her the courage to return home in the end.


“‘Migration is inherent to their nature,’ Niall says.

‘But it doesn’t have to be,’ Harriet says. ‘We live now in a state of necessary adaptation. This is what’s required of them—it is the only means of survival, as it has always been.’

‘Haven’t we forced them to adapt to our devastation enough?’”


Ultimately, this novel is about how to make peace with the choices that one has made, as well as how to remain hopeful despite the choices that others have made. It begins as a farewell, but ends with a rebirth. Like many other works centered around the environment, Migrations feels both modern and timeless. And still, at its core, it is a literary love story—in it are echoes of the tenderness one can find mirrored almost exactly in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s novella, The Little Prince, as well as Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, both of which are animated films.

It is difficult to believe that this is McConaghy’s first foray into literary fiction. Her writing is so unique: the melodic prose becomes a landscape of its own, contoured with precise and evocative sensory details. It dug into my soul and packed it with simultaneous bouts of sorrow and comfort. Migrations is one of the most underrated pieces of fiction I’ve ever come across. Simply put, it is pure magic.


“There’s a difference between wandering and leaving. In truth, you’ve never once left me.”