'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 dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive.
'How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica.
'As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny’s life begin to unspool. A daughter’s yearning search for her mother. An impulsive, passionate marriage. A shocking crime. Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards – and from.
'The Last Migration is a wild, gripping and deeply moving novel from a brilliant young writer. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, through crashing Atlantic swells to the bottom of the world, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic story of the possibility of hope against all odds.'
Source: Publisher's blurb
A brief review of this work appeared in The New York Times 16 July 2021
'This article considers the ways in which selected contemporary novels represent the limitation of options as a primary consequence of climate change. I will offer an ecocritical literary analysis of the following four novels by female authors: The New Wilderness (2020) by Diane Cook, A Children’s Bible (2020) by Lydia Millet, Weather (2020) by Jenny Offill and The Last Migration (2021) by Charlotte McConaghy. The novels present worlds where very definite choices, in already severely constrained contexts, need to be made. These choices are matters of survival and they have nothing to do with fulfilling constructed consumer dreams. The texts offer worlds in which characters navigate radically new terrains where survival is an urgent imperative. I will consider how the notions of limitation and shrinking (of their worlds and their options) recur as leitmotifs throughout the novels and I will explore how this shrinkage forces them to reconsider not only their own actions but also the consequences of the actions of people in general, with a specific focus on the causal relationship between those actions and climate change.' (Publication abstract)
'This article explores how two authors represent female characters who engage with the impending climate catastrophe by exposing and challenging anthropocentrism, albeit in very different ways. The selected novels, Weather by Jenny Offill, and The Last Migration by Charlotte McConaghy, were published in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Both novels were met with significant critical acclaim and both announce their central authorial impetuses in their titles. Offill’s main character, Lizzie, lives a life of middle class privilege with her husband and young son in New York while McConaghy’s protagonist, Franny, has lost her husband and child and scrapes a living as she moves between Ireland, Australia and Greenland. I use a theoretical framework that can broadly be described as feminist ecocriticism as a lens for my analysis and I mobilise conceptual interventions by scholars working in a range of fields related to climate change and critical animal studies. I will explore how the female characters in my selected novels navigate the impending climate catastrophe and I will argue that scholars can gain insight into their experiences by paying close attention to how the authors challenge anthropocentrism in their representations of these experiences. In order to work towards staunching the damage human beings are doing to the natural world, we need to build interactions that honour, respect and affirm the lives of all inhabitants with whom we share the earth. The relationships I investigate in this article mostly fall far short of these goals and these failures can be traced back to the stubborn insistence or, at times, unquestioned assumption, that human beings have greater value than the rest of the world we inhabit. This inability to relate meaningfully and empathetically to the rest of the natural world allows humans to wreak the havoc that has resulted in the contemporary climate crisis. I will illustrate that the glimmers of hope that the texts do offer can be found in the instances where the human characters at least attempt respectful interactions with their nonhuman counterparts in ways that honour and affirm the value of their animal lives.' (Publication abstract)
'This article explores how two authors represent female characters who engage with the impending climate catastrophe by exposing and challenging anthropocentrism, albeit in very different ways. The selected novels, Weather by Jenny Offill, and The Last Migration by Charlotte McConaghy, were published in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Both novels were met with significant critical acclaim and both announce their central authorial impetuses in their titles. Offill’s main character, Lizzie, lives a life of middle class privilege with her husband and young son in New York while McConaghy’s protagonist, Franny, has lost her husband and child and scrapes a living as she moves between Ireland, Australia and Greenland. I use a theoretical framework that can broadly be described as feminist ecocriticism as a lens for my analysis and I mobilise conceptual interventions by scholars working in a range of fields related to climate change and critical animal studies. I will explore how the female characters in my selected novels navigate the impending climate catastrophe and I will argue that scholars can gain insight into their experiences by paying close attention to how the authors challenge anthropocentrism in their representations of these experiences. In order to work towards staunching the damage human beings are doing to the natural world, we need to build interactions that honour, respect and affirm the lives of all inhabitants with whom we share the earth. The relationships I investigate in this article mostly fall far short of these goals and these failures can be traced back to the stubborn insistence or, at times, unquestioned assumption, that human beings have greater value than the rest of the world we inhabit. This inability to relate meaningfully and empathetically to the rest of the natural world allows humans to wreak the havoc that has resulted in the contemporary climate crisis. I will illustrate that the glimmers of hope that the texts do offer can be found in the instances where the human characters at least attempt respectful interactions with their nonhuman counterparts in ways that honour and affirm the value of their animal lives.' (Publication abstract)
'This article considers the ways in which selected contemporary novels represent the limitation of options as a primary consequence of climate change. I will offer an ecocritical literary analysis of the following four novels by female authors: The New Wilderness (2020) by Diane Cook, A Children’s Bible (2020) by Lydia Millet, Weather (2020) by Jenny Offill and The Last Migration (2021) by Charlotte McConaghy. The novels present worlds where very definite choices, in already severely constrained contexts, need to be made. These choices are matters of survival and they have nothing to do with fulfilling constructed consumer dreams. The texts offer worlds in which characters navigate radically new terrains where survival is an urgent imperative. I will consider how the notions of limitation and shrinking (of their worlds and their options) recur as leitmotifs throughout the novels and I will explore how this shrinkage forces them to reconsider not only their own actions but also the consequences of the actions of people in general, with a specific focus on the causal relationship between those actions and climate change.' (Publication abstract)
