Description

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

It is 1938 and on an island off the coast of Wales, Manod is trying to imagine her future. Her choices are stark: she must either stay and look after her father’s house, in the wild landscape that drove her mother to madness, or marry and leave. And so, when two English anthropologists arrive on the island, Manod senses the possibility of a thrilling new life. But, as she becomes entangled in their work, and their strange relationship, the outside world she had yearned for appears a much darker place than she could ever have imagined.

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

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 . . . 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 * 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 — 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 * 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 *