Just when I thought I’d put together my end-of-year top read lists, along comes Charlotte McConaghy’s beautiful book to throw the cat amongst the Arctic terns!

In this mesmerisingly melancholy novel, McConaghy, like so many authors I’ve read this year, manages to distil much about our current moment in her writing. I have been blown away by some of the ways in which literature has confronted the looming devastation of climate change and this novel is certainly up there with the most powerful, most moving written responses so far.

There is a deep and mournful sense of loneliness and isolation that radiates off the pages here, and right from the opening lines- “The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here’’- I couldn’t shake off this pervasive sadness as I joined Franny on her journey.

And what a character Franny is! A wanderer by nature, Franny sets off on a mission to pursue the last known Arctic terns as they migrate across the world. She is running far away from her own losses and sorrow, intent on following the birds to her end. Franny is elusive and mercurial throughout but as her story unravels across her journey, as we learn what has prompted her own restless migrations, it it hard not to be devastated for her.

It is an enchanting, layered novel, as transportive as the name implies and as elegiac and full of lament as a book about mass extinction and grief should be. It is a haunting story about wildness- the untameable wildness within and the sabotaged wildness fading all around us. I sincerely hope it’s not a vision of our future but it, sadly, feels very prescient and not all that far off. Ominous prophecies aside, this is a heartbreaking character study and, simply, a bloody good book.