Migrations features the troubled Franny Stone who, in a not-so-future world where the oceans are empty of fish and all birds are disappearing due to climate change, follows the last Arctic terns in the world on their final migration from Greenland to Antarctica (the longest bird migration known). But the increasingly unbalanced Franny is not who she seems. Her drive is inspiring even when the hope of success is miniscule, and the path is treacherous.

Once There Were Wolves also addresses the human impact on environments. In the remote Scottish Highlands a landscape is dying because of a missing link in the ecosystem’s survival chain: wolves. Against the vocal and violent protests of Highlanders—killers of these predators that decimated their livestock—biologist Inti Flynn and her crew reintroduce 14 Canadian gray wolves into the area. What follows is murder and mayhem and perhaps insanity…

In all three of McConaghy’s books, the human characters have unique savant-level skills that make them very strange. Yet you fall in love so deeply that your fear for them as the stories roll along is very real. And you may never learn as much about seals, insects, plants, Arctic terns and wolves than in these three books.

Yet it’s the nonhuman characters of the natural world—animals, land, oceans, trees, etc.—that star here. Perhaps it’s because of how effectively the author evokes the sense that it’s already too late. The threat in each book is already at the brink of changing our world forever. She brings this dystopic future so close that we don’t question our world is bound for collapse tomorrow…if not today…or yesterday.

The stories do not rely on each other, so there’s no order to enjoy these books in. I read them Shores, Wolves and Migrations (backwards by release dates). The writer perhaps grows in skill somewhat from the first to the most recent, but I’d suggest you just get to the library and check out any of these three amazing books that may still be available.

All three of these books are now part of the Coffman collection, living on the Recent & Relevant shelves for the next few months; after they will be shelved together in Fiction under McConaghy.

resident was given a quota of books that s/he could donate to the Library. New resident and former Professor of Theatre Arts Dr. David Thompson supervised volunteers who sorted and categorized those books. By December 1986, the books were on the shelves, ready for browsing and borrowing.

We are indebted to those pioneer residents who donated books from their personal collections. Some of those early donations (e.g. art, drama, fiction, and poetry) are classics and still on the shelves today. Their local history donations constitute the core of the Library’s MINNESOTA/MIDWEST collection on the Library’s upper level.

Those early Library Committee members also recognized that there were important books throughout the collection written or edited by Coffman residents and deserving to be in the permanent collection. These were assembled together, also on the upper level, in a section designated 1666 AUTHORS.

Budget, collection size, and usage statistics from the early days are sketchy. However, in an April 1992, 1666 Coffman News article there was a hint of overcrowding on the library shelves. By late 1993, the overcrowding was impossible to ignore.

In a December 1993 article, resident and former Director of University of Minnesota Libraries Edward “Ned” Stanford wrote that the shelves were “bursting at the seams.” His compelling case for removing (weeding) less useful books from the shelves was approved by the Board soon after.

​Today, the Library Committee adds books to the collection based on written guidelines. We keep detailed statistics on which books are of most interest to residents. We try to assign more shelf space to residents’ favorite genres and subjects. We address crowded shelves as soon as we recognize them. In short, we do what we can so that our Library’s collection lives up to its “Jewel in the Crown” nickname.