A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive. For fans of Flight Behavior and Station Eleven, a novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world’s last birds―and her own final chance for redemption. Migrations has been named a “most anticipated” book by Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Elle, and more. Emily St. John Mandel calls this powerful novel “extraordinary.” Start reading Migrations now.
We have loads more reading about the environment on Book Riot, so definitely go check those out, too!
In her own activism work, Arundhati Roy writes a lot about industrialization, environmental destruction, and social justice. This novel includes similar themes, as well as deforestation, the gross mistreatment of migrants and climate refugees, poverty and class disparity, insufficient public infrastructure, and gentrification, along with various resistance movements in India. It is important to demonstrate how interconnected the climate emergency is to all elements of society, and this novel does just that.
After we leave Adam, following chapters of the novel follow Adam’s next generations of family. If you like intergenerational family stories, this narrative follows that structure, but with a dystopic background of political and climate collapse.
We begin in a fictional city based off of Cartagena, by the banks of a river and near the mouth of the Caribbean Sea. It is a lush, tropical, and even quite a romantic environment. Which makes sense, because the core story is of a complicated love triangle. But in the background of the love and relationship drama, the backdrop is full of socio-political corruption, environmental destruction, morally-corrupt politicians, and self-interested businessmen who extract without limits. In the end, deforestation and out-of-control hunting results in the previously lush environment stripped back to nothing. Along the way, the novel has a lot to say about the moral corruption of society, and the ways humans driven by greed can destroy the environment around them.
