“I lie in the sea and feel more lost than ever, because I’m not meant to be homesick, I’m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave. It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.”

The Last Migration is the first adult literary fiction book by Australian author, Charlotte McConaghy. A dire near future, a world of mass extinctions, oceans almost empty of fish: Franny Lynch boards a fishing vessel in Tasiilaq to follow her tagged bird, one of perhaps the very last Arctic terns, on its long migration south.

Under harsh conditions of extreme cold, wild storms and a tense relationship with the crew who seem to barely tolerate her, Franny’s mind cannot avoid forays into her troubled past: parental abandonment, a fervent love, heart-breaking tragedies, grief and incarceration.

Franny Lynch comes from a line of women possessed of wanderlust, but she meets the one man with whom this need not spell disaster: “I rest my head on his shoulder; I rest myself in his hands. It seems a safe place to be kept, even to belong. But where does he get to belong. What crueller fate is there than to belong in the arms of a woman who dies each night?”

But now she makes the journey, selecting this reticent sea captain, Ennis Malone, convincing him to take her along, promising the thing he wants most. She watches the crew: “Even though they are as varied as a group of people can be, I can tell they are all the same, all of these sailors. Something was missing in their lives on land, and they went seeking the answer. Whatever it was, I don’t doubt that they each found it. They are migrants of land, and they love it out here on an ocean that offered them a different way of life…”

What could possibly underlie a determination so single-minded, so all-consuming that this conservation-minded woman can set aside what seems a clear conflict of interest to board a vessel whose captain is equally obsessed with securing the Golden Catch? As the story jumps from present to past and back, McConaghy gradually introduces snippets of Franny’s life that coalesce to form a heart-breaking picture. The resulting “aah” moment will have even the most callous reader choking up with tears.

McConaghy gives the reader gorgeous prose, marvellous characters, some extremely topical subject matter, plenty of emotion and a smidgen of hope. A map would have enhanced the enjoyment of this brilliant novel.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by Better Reading Preview and Penguin Books Australia