Charlotte McConaghy · 2020 · sea

Charlotte McConaghy's 2020 novel, published in Australia as The Last Migration. In a near future where almost every wild animal is extinct, Franny Stone tags three of the last Arctic terns in Greenland and talks her way onto a fishing boat to follow them to Antarctica - because terns find fish, and fish are nearly finished too.

1. 1
   Galway

   The west of Ireland, where Franny Stone is from and where her mother walked out - a childhood of watching people leave, and an inheritance of wanderlust she describes as being able to love but unable to stay.

2. 2
   Australia

   Sent as a teenager to the south coast, where she later meets Niall Lynch, an ornithologist who studies Arctic terns - and marries him, and cannot stay, and the marriage becomes the thing the whole novel is circling.

3. 3
   Tasiilaq

   East Greenland in nesting season, in a world where nearly every wild animal is gone - Franny tags three of the last Arctic terns and then talks her way onto the Saghani, one of the last boats legally allowed to fish.

4. 4
   The North Atlantic

   Following a red dot on a tracker south, with a crew who have taken her aboard because terns find fish and fish are nearly finished - and a captain, Ennis Malone, who is on one last voyage before the ban.

5. 5
   The Equator

   Down the length of the Atlantic on the longest migration any animal makes, pole to pole - and the further south they go the more of Franny's past comes out, and none of it is what the crew were told.

6. 6
   The South Atlantic

   Storms, a man overboard, and a boat that is not going to make it - and the crew scatter, and what began as a fishing voyage becomes something none of them signed on for.

7. 7
   Antarctica

   Franny and Malone reach the ice on a stolen yacht called the Sterna paradisaea, which is the Latin name of the bird - and she finds out whether any of the three terns she tagged got there, which is the only question she has left.