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A BBC ‘BETWEEN THE COVERS’ BOOK CLUB PICK

‘I didn’t want it to end’ – Maggie O’Farrell
‘Powerful . . . written with a calm, luminous precision’ – Colm Toibin
An Observer Best Debut of the Year 2024

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.

‘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

Publisher Review

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 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 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 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 — Sean 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 *