Whale Fall

It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself. The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island's shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what's to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island's harsh, salt-stung landscape.When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been searching for. But as she guides them across the island's cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.

Evocative and haunting . . . written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. It teems with visceral imagery -- Jude Cook Guardian
O’Connor’s beautifully evocative debut explores the liminal spaces between aspiration and disappointment, adolescence and adulthood, land and sea . . . a highly impressive coming-of-age tale The Observer
'An excellent debut . . . Brief but complete, the book is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude' -- Maggie Shipstead New York Times
A beautifully nuanced, beguiling first novel, which leaves room for hope. O’Connor has a promising career ahead The Times
An astonishingly assured debut that straddles many polarities: love and loss, the familiar and the strange, trust and betrayal, land and sea, life and death. O’Connor has created a beguiling and beguiled narrator in Manod: I loved seeing the world through her eyes, and I didn’t want it to end -- Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait
An exquisite, evocative coming-of-age story that takes place in a world on the cusp of great change The Observer, Debuts of the Year 2024
A powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiselled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy -- Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician and Brooklyn
The quiet cadences of Whale Fall contain a deep melody of loss held and let go. It is a gentle, tough story about profound change -- Anne Enright, Booker Prize winning author of The Wren, the Wren
Quietly powerful first novel . . . Writing with graceful minimalism . . . O’Connor gently pulls together the book’s threads, evoking the mismatch between hidebound locals and fleet-footed incomers whose passing whims exact a heavy emotional toll Daily Mail
I absolutely adored Whale Fall, I fell completely under its spell. Every sentence rang with clarity and authenticity. It's a triumph -- Elizabeth Macneal, bestselling author of The Doll Factory
This poised debut balances betrayal and loss with change and self-realisation Mail on Sunday
A haunting, unhurried, unusual debut, that vividly evokes the life of a teenage girl on a sparsely populated Welsh island in 1938 . . . O’Connor offers a clear-eyed exploration of our tendency to fetishize the rural, the isolated, and what it means to become an object of study -- Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre
O’Connor’s spare, incisive prose brings the island to vivid life — both its frequent devastations as well as its resolute continuity . . . Beguiling and compelling Boston Globe
Mesmerising. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite -- Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing . . . transporting and utterly beautiful -- Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
I devoured the exquisite Whale Fall. Immersive, elegiac and silvered with salt - beautiful -- Lizzie Pook, author of Maude Horton's Glorious Revenge
An evocative, slow-burn tale The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen Kirkus
O'Connor's precise and spare prose feels at once claustrophobic and full of possibility, while emulating the interior of her yearning protagonist. A notable debut imbued with the pain of buried promise Booklist
Genuine and captivating, Whale Fall has a wonderful blend of complexity and heart that will give every reader something to think about for weeks after finishing it Michigan Daily
[O'Connor] conjures up a mood of things on the cusp: adulthood, the end of a community, and, given the time it’s set, war. It’s also a period when competing ideologies froth and broil against each other, and O’Connor captures all this, and more, in the subtlest of shades Crack Magazine
Slender but vibrant, like a watercolour painted outside Perspective

Elizabeth O'Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize in 2020. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, on the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes.

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