The Migration

By: Helen Marshall

Narrated by: Alison Deon, Marilla Wex

Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

Finalist for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic

"A dark fable that somehow feels both timeless and urgently topical. The Migration is heart-wringing and powerful, but over and above that, it's just vivid and immersive and enthralling throughout." (M.R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts)

When I was younger, I didn't know a thing about death. I thought it meant stillness, a body gone limp. A marionette with its strings cut. Death was like a long vacation - a going away. Not this.

Storms and flooding are worsening around the world, and a mysterious immune disorder has begun to afflict the young. Sophie Perella is about to begin her senior year of high school in Toronto when her little sister, Kira, is diagnosed. Their parents' marriage falters under the strain, and Sophie's mother takes the girls to Oxford, England, to live with their Aunt Irene.

An Oxford University professor and historical epidemiologist obsessed with relics of the Black Death, Irene works with a center that specializes in treating people with the illness. She is a friend to Sophie and offers a window into a strange and ancient history of human plague and recovery. Sophie just wants to understand what's happening now; but as mortality rates climb and reports emerge of bodily tremors in the deceased, it becomes clear there is nothing normal about this condition - and that the dead aren't staying dead.

When Kira succumbs, Sophie faces an unimaginable choice: let go of the sister she knows or take action to embrace something terrifying and new.

Tender and chilling, unsettling and hopeful, The Migration is a story of a young woman's dawning awareness of mortality and the power of the human heart to thrive in cataclysmic circumstances.

©2019 Helen Marshall (P)2019 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

2020 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic

“This beautifully written fictional blend of biology, history, and the human heart is a clear-eyed, clean-limbed parable of change. Marshall’s close focus on the nature of emotional and physical metamorphosis becomes a blazing emblem of the transcendent power of hope.” (Nicola Griffith, author of the Light of the World trilogy)

“A dark fable that somehow feels both timeless and urgently topical. The Migration is heart-wringing and powerful, but over and above that, it’s just vivid and immersive and enthralling throughout.” (M.R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts)

"Intelligent, dark, wildly inventive, The Migration does more than put a new twist on the apocalyptic outbreak novel. It dares to be full of heart and full of difficult, defiant hope.” (Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World)

Expected a zombie story.

Got something way more fantastical, and loved it.

Reader is a little slow, but not bad.