Loss, Redemption and the Pull of the Sea: Five Questions for Charlotte McConaghy, Author of Migrations—Our August Discover Pick.

Migrations is a love letter to the natural world—a breathtaking portrait of grief, trauma and the lengths we will go to for those we love. A world on the brink of catastrophe parallels a young woman searching for redemption in this haunting and completely captivating debut—and, our latest Discover Pick of the Month. This is a story you just won’t be able to shake and is an absolute dream for fans of Flight Behavior and Station Eleven. We couldn’t wait to ask Charlotte McConaghy five questions (even though we had so many more!) on everything from the inspiration behind her novel, her love of selkies and Irish folklore, to what she’s reading now.
Climate change, mass extinction, loss, redemption… there are so many beautiful parallels throughout, but what came first—how did this story start for you?
First and foremost, this was a story about loss and redemption. It was the story of a woman who’d lost all hope, but over the course of an impossible journey – this sea voyage to follow the flight of the Arctic terns – she manages to reclaim it, and she does that by reconnecting with not only the people around her and the beauty that remains in the world, but with her own self-worth. Franny Stone came first, but because she was so connected to the natural world, I quickly realized the setting this book needed was one in which she could feel the loss of that natural world more keenly— and so I embraced climate change and the extinction crisis, making that flock of terns Franny follows the last of their kind.
While each character is defined by loss in some way, they all arrive from such vastly different backgrounds… it almost feels like we wouldn’t have one without the others. Did they come to you in any order?
Franny came first of course, and then her husband Niall came as a kind of counterbalance to her. He needed to represent pessimism and the idea that humans are a destructive force on the planet, while I wanted Franny to reflect optimism in the face of this crisis and the idea that we are capable of nurturing above destruction. Next came Ennis, the fishing captain, and although at first, he seems very different to Franny and her conservationist husband, it becomes clear that he and Franny are actually two birds of a feather, determined and obsessive by nature. I had fun developing the rest of the crew members as they were characters who represented the joy of life at sea and, while they all came from very different backgrounds, they felt the same sense of separation from the rest of society.
Without giving too much away, can we talk about selkies? What’s your take on these mythic creatures?
I love Irish mythology and the selkie folklore, in particular. I was raised on it. The idea of seals who shed their skin to walk on land as humans, who can fall in love with humans but will always be tied deeply to the ocean and bound to return to it… this is beautiful and tragic to me, and really informed the way I drew Franny. She, too, is bound to the ocean; she has an internal compass that leads her not to true north, but to true sea, and she often feels like she was born in the wrong body. In the same way, she is a wanderer, driven to always be roaming. Though she wants family and connection more than anything, it’s this instinctive need to leave that makes it hard for her to have those things, which we see manifested in the passionate but difficult love she shares with her husband. Franny thinks in the novel, ‘it’s not fair to be a creature who is able to love, but unable to stay.’
Did anything surprise you or catch you off guard as you were writing Migrations?
While of course I knew things were bad environmentally, I was shocked to discover during my research on climate change; that over the last 50 years alone, humans have killed over 60% of the world’s wild animals. I couldn’t believe the figures were so dire and it made me start considering our impact on the natural world in a very different way which, in turn, informed what I was exploring in Migrations.
But on a more intimate level, I was constantly surprised by how much agency my protagonist Franny had; in some ways it felt like she was making her own choices and guiding me through the story, which is such a strange and, in some ways, thrilling feeling.
We always have to ask: Who are you reading and recommending right now?
Although none of these are exactly new releases, (my to-be-read pile is a teetering tower) the books I’ve read lately and loved are:
The Overstory by Richard Powers – you’ll never look at trees in the same way again.
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson – her prose is astounding and I’m very much looking forward to her new novel, Sisters.
Boy Swallows Universe, a wonderful Australian novel by Trent Dalton.