Author(s): Elizabeth O'Connor

Novel | Historical | Britain | Wales

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.

Elizabeth O'Connor's beautiful, devastating debut Whale Fall tells a story of longing and betrayal set against the backdrop of a world on the edge of great tumult. An Observer Best Debut of the Year 2024.

Review: 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 . . . To different eyes, the same island might look like a prison or a romantic enclave, but to actually apprehend the truth of a place or person requires patience, nuanced attention and the painstaking accrual of details. Understanding is hard work, O'Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book's end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve. -- 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 Toibin, 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 *