Whale Fall: A Novel

by Elizabeth O'Connor

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

For fans of Carys Davies’ Clear, Whale Fall is a stunning coming-of-age tale of a girl caught on the precipice between adulthood and childhood, familiarity and the unknown.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK • A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one’s community

"Whale Fall is a powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy." —Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture, then, feels like a boon to her—both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.

With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593686010
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

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

Read an Excerpt

I was born on the island on 20th January 1920. My birth certificate read 30th January 1920, because my father could not get to the registration office on the mainland before then. There was a great winter storm and no one could leave the island. When we were finally able to cross, my mother used to tell me, the beach was covered in jellyfish, like a silver path of ice. My mother survived the birth, thank Jesus, because no one could have come to help her.

The island was three miles long and one mile wide, with a lighthouse marking the eastern point and a dark cave marking the west. There were twelve families, the minister, and Polish Lukasz who worked in the lighthouse. Our house, Rose Cottage, was set into the side of a hill, where the wind wrapped a fist around it. Tad said the army should have made tanks out of our windows, the way they stood against the weather. The glass had warped and splintered in places but still held fast to the frame. In the bedroom, at night, you could hear our neighbours’ goats calling out to their young through a crack in the pane, and sometimes you could see a candle in their house burning like a coin balanced on the top of the hill.

-

Tad always called me by the dog’s name. On the day of the whale, he passed me in the yard, calling for the dog. I was trying to clear dust from the hearth-rug, but watched as it formed a silvery layer over my clothes instead. I had to bat the midges away from my eyes.

"I’m going on the boats, Elis," Tad said.

"Manod," I said. "Not Elis. Elis is the dog’s name."

"I know, I know that."

He waved me away. He headed down the path towards the sea. His rubber boots made a sucking sound on each step.

"That’s what I said," I heard him say. "Manod. That’s what I said."

On the other side of the yard, Tad dried mackerel by stringing them up on a line. He loved the dog: there was one section of dried fish just for him. My father barely spoke to me or my sister, but at night I heard him mumble long conversations with Elis. In the yard, Elis ran circles sniffing at the lichen between the slabs of stone, barely stopping, barely looking up at me. I cut a fish down for him, and he ran into the hawthorn ungratefully, sending up a small cloud of dried dirt and leaves.

I rubbed at a smear on my dress. It was an old one of my mother’s, dark flannel with loose threads trailing at each hem. Mam made her own clothes and then taught me. She made them practically, with wide pockets and space for moving around. I liked to copy the patterns in the magazines women left behind in the chapel. Mainland trends. From them I realised most people on the island dressed ten years behind everywhere else. Sometimes suit- cases were washed up the shore and in them I found old garments to wear or take apart for the material. I found a ballgown once, with only a small tear at the hip, in anemone-red silk. It had a small pocket on one side, and out of it came a gold-plated powder compact, shaped like a scallop shell. The powder puff was still orange from contact with its owner’s skin.

-

Our neighbour appeared soon after Tad left, his clothes and hair dripping. I could see him come over the hill to where his wife was milking one of their goats. I could smell him from where I stood, the damp of his sheepskin jerkin and his soaked shirt beneath. His wife ran to him and cupped his face. I felt awkward watching them, and stood combing my fingers through my hair. I could hear snatches of what he told Leah: We thought it was a boat. Do you think it’s a bad sign? I watched Leah’s hands stiffen, the breath catch in her throat.

-

Not one person on the island knew how to swim. The men did not learn how, and so neither did the women. The sea was dangerous and I suppose we had lived with its danger too long. A popular saying amongst them: Out of the boat and into the water. Out of the frying pan into the fire. Out of the boat and God help you.

There used to be a king on the island, who wore a brass crown. When he died in the previous decade, no one wanted to do it anymore. Most of the young men had been killed in the war, or were trying to get a job on the mainland. The ones left were too busy on the fishing boats. So it goes. According to my mother, the women were not asked.

-

My sister spread butter over bread with her fingers, eating the bread and then licking her fingers one by one. You’re too old for that, I told her, and she stuck out her tongue at me. I poured tea into three cups on the table, and watched it steam.

Llinos turned the cup around in front of her, as though inspecting it from every angle. She combed her fingers through her hair. I thought of something my mother used to say about us: Ni allaf ddweud wrth un chwaer oddi wrth un arall. I can’t tell one sister from the other. There are six years between us, but only one of us is still a child, so that is no longer true.

"What’s the English word?" I asked her.

"I don’t know."

"Yes, you do."

Llinos gulped her tea, and winced. "Hot," she said.

"It’s whale."

I looked over to Tad to support me. I had been trying to improve Llinos’s English all summer but she was stubborn. Tad sat with his head hanging back, his eyes closed. One hand in his lap and the other holding Elis’s muzzle. His clothes were drying in front of the fire, mixing the smell of laundry with the smell of fish. Ours was a small front room: space for a table, chairs, fire and a small dresser. The dresser was covered in drips of candle wax. Tad had taken out his dental plate with its three pearlescent teeth, and left it in the centre.

By the door was a bucket with the lobsters he had caught that day. In the silences of our conversation, I could hear them move in the water, claws scraping against the bucket’s metal side. I watched a shadow rise and fall on the other side of the room, and realised it was my hand. I collected the plates and asked Tad if he had seen the whale.

"Out at sea," he said, rubbing a calloused patch on his knuckles, "normally you see more than one."

"Didn’t Mam used to talk about whales?" Llinos said.

Dark turn. "Surely they are bad luck."

"You sound like a mad old woman," I said.

I cleared our plates, gave the scraps to Elis on the floor. Tad held my wrist after I took his cup, then moved his hand over mine.

"Marc was asking after you today. Said how nice you looked at chapel."

"And what did you say?"

Tad shrugged.

"I told him to ask you."

"You can tell him no, I don’t want to." Tad sighed and looked at his hands.

"You should be thinking about getting married. It doesn’t have to be Marc. It could be Llew."

"I’m eighteen."

"The time goes fast." His voice softened. "I can’t have you here forever."

"Who would look after Llinos?"

Elis had reared up onto his hind legs next to Llinos’s chair, twisting his head to lick up crumbs from the table. Llinos turned and caught his front paws. She stood up next to him, so that they looked like a couple dancing. They swayed from side to side, and Elis opened his mouth wide and panted.

I looked at the bottom of my cup. The milk had formed a film over the surface and puckered, like a strange kiss.

-

In the night I dreamt of a long dinner table, with whales dressed in formal clothes laughing over their plates. I was with them, in a dress I saw in a magazine once, made of pear-green silk, and a hat with a long white feather. After- wards they danced and I could not say how they were moving, if they were on the tips of their tails or sliding from side to side, just that I was lifted from my feet and spun and spun around. The ceiling was made of lace and velvet, and slowly fell down to me.

-

I had only been a month away from school. The school was in an old farm building owned by the chapel, large enough for the ten or so children on the island to be taught in its two rooms. We had a desk each, damp wood, and mostly read the Bible. Sister Mary and Sister Gwennan came for a few months at a time, in between teaching at a school on the mainland. The books they brought us had stamps in the front cover reading Our Lady of the Wayside in faded gold lettering. We wore white on special days like St Dwynwen’s day.

I had a friend at school. Rosslyn sat next to me for ten years and then went to the mainland to marry a quarry worker in Pwllheli, a man with a pink face and an unkind mouth. Rosslyn had met him a few times before she left, visiting his town when her father rowed to the mainland market. At the back of the classroom she confided in me about his meaty breath, the things he said to her. On the day she left the island for good, her father had filled his small boat with flowers and grass. His crying could be heard from the dunes. Rosslyn had curly hair and a round face that shone always with sweat. I always thought she looked like a model I had seen once, on a small card that came with a bar of soap. She sent me a letter after she married; saying she missed me, that she lived in a house with an indoor toilet. The end of her letter asked me what I was doing, and what I planned to do. I had not replied.

I was good at school. Sister Mary called me "bright" and let me visit her on Saturdays, where she would show me large maps and let me borrow her English novels. When one of the boys applied to a university in England, he asked Sister Mary to check his application, and Sister Mary asked me to do it. I left two spelling mistakes in on purpose, but he still got a place. He said that he would write to me about it, but he never did. His mother showed me a photograph of him on a boat on the river, wearing a long black coat. I had begged to keep the photograph, not because of the boy in it but because his face was slightly washed out, meaning that I could pretend the person in the boat was me.

On the last day of school my teacher had not even said goodbye. She said, I’ll see you at the market.

-

The tide was high. Tad’s tide calendar, the one he would leave behind for us, did not say that it would be. The calen- dar was typed out on pink paper, and he was given a new one every season when he visited the mainland. He said he did not need it, judged the tide by sight like his own father had. I did not like to remind him of the times he had been incorrect, when he had come home with damp trousers and shoes filled with sand.

I walked down to the beach to see the whale for myself. When I walked alone I liked to daydream, sometimes about working for a wealthy family on the mainland as a seamstress, or being a nun somewhere in Europe, living in a tall white tower in a city square. In my head I recited Bible verses in an English accent, and made the shape of each word with my tongue.
I followed the people to find the whale. The cove was flat and I could see bodies crowded together. The sand was damp and sucked at my shoes.

In the water, where the rocks were covered in waxy black and yellow seaweed, four men were guiding a bull onto a boat to take it over to the mainland. One walked circles behind it, guiding it forwards. Another stood in the water, next to the centre of the boat, ready to grab it by the horns and hold it still. One waited inside the boat with a coil of rope around his shoulders, ready to attach the bull to an iron ring in the hull. The bull walked slowly, flicking its head. When the man on the beach came closer to it, the bull kicked up its feet. The bull was black, with a thin white stripe down its nose, a bright fissure.

When I passed the men, the one on the beach stopped and turned to face me. He took his hat from his head and did a funny little bow. I ignored him, and the other men laughed. The boat swayed, and the bull ran past them. It ran into the water, and the men cried out. I walked on faster, listening to their shouting, the waves, the bull’s snorting.

The water was pale brown, and the froth reminded me of when Tad boiled sheep heads on the stove, fleece around the rim of the pan. I watched it come closer to my feet, only inches away, and retreat back again. I hated when water got into my shoes.

As I got closer to the crowd of people around the whale, I saw that there were birds there too, flying in circles and diving at something. One flew right over my shoulder, carrying something in its beak. A boat had been left on its side in the sand, and a cat slunk out from the hull and hissed at me.

I weaved through the people. The rushing of each wave revealed the body of the whale, gigantic and curled against itself. I thought of the way I would tell my sister about it when she returned from school, committing the sight of it to memory, the dark hull of its spine and the fringe of its mouth, bronze in the low-coming light.

-

Walking back, I turned and thought I saw my mother standing in the middle of it all. She bent down and touched something. There was fog around her hair and shoulders. Her woollen clothes looked wet. When I looked later the rocks were covered in white lichen, its fronds shaped like minuscule hands.

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2025 Chautauqua Prize
An ALA Notable Fiction Book
Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and NPR
A New York Times Notable Book of 2024
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

“Both blunt and exquisite . . . O’Connor’s excellent debut . . . is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude.”
—Maggie Shipstead, New York Times Book Review

"Spare and bracing...O'Connor constructs her setting with precise, atmospheric detail that captures a world slowly being eroded....It all makes for a haunting and lucid exploration of the moments leading up to immense change."
—NPR

"Whale Fall is 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 the novel to end."
—Maggie O'Farrell, New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet

"Whale Fall is a powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy"
—Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island

"O’Connor’s slim, powerful debut vibrates with elemental, immediate, and palpable scenes and descriptions...O’Connor’s spare, incisive prose brings the island to vivid life."
—Boston Globe

“In Whale Fall, the landscape and its people speak together…By rejecting nostalgia but still foregrounding landscape, Whale Fall makes space for the more intimate, surreal ways that culture can relate to nature.”
—The Nation

“Evocative and haunting...written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. [Whale Fall] teems with visceral imagery.”
—The Guardian

"A haunting, unhurried, unusual debut...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, New York Times bestselling author of The Whalebone Theater


"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 Prizewinning author of The Gathering

“Mesmerizing. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite.”
—Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock

“Elizabeth O'Connor's novel is an exquisite coming-of-age story, a beautifully crafted debut that plays with form—white space, fragments, transcripts, ethnographers' notes—to create a nuanced account…of a place that is defined by its harsh conditions.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"These minimalist pages shimmer...What a testament to the capaciousness, generosity and emotional range of true art."
—Scientific American

“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

“From the opening sentences, the prose is direct, gorgeous, sometimes barren but rife with meaning.”
—Brooklyn Rail

“O'Connor's precise and spare prose feels...full of possibility, while emulating the interior of her yearning protagonist. A notable debut imbued with the pain of buried promise.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“[A] luminous first novel...Literary voyagers looking for new worlds should add this to their itinerary.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“O’Connor prompts us to consider what it is to experience ourselves—and our cultures—through strangers’ eyes. A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Mesmerizing...Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the community’s transformation. Entrancing descriptions illuminate the raw beauty of the island through seasonal changes.
—Bookpage

“O’Connor manages to extract the fullest level of excitement, introspection and drama out of each detail of her perfectly crafted work…Manod’s adventures and musings take place in a perfectly rendered island, a castaway in her own hometown. If you love seafaring, island living and off-kilter ways of surviving, Whale Fall will not let you fetishize the place or the people. It’s too good of a book for that. Hidden in a historical setting, it gives the reader a heady mix of philosophy, coming of age, relationships, toxic masculinity and gossip while holding true to its hauntingly slow and suspenseful building of those details into a beautiful, bold cautionary tale. As a debut novelist, O’Connor must be celebrated for completely overhauling the elements she uses in her storytelling, which we have seen from the likes of Isabel Allende, Edith Wharton and Toni Morrison. The way that she uses the characters’ differences to bind them to each other is nothing less than heroic. Whale Fall is a wonderful novel to be savored for all of its beauty.”
—Bookreporter

“Fresh and distinctive...Whale Fall is a beautifully nuanced, beguiling first novel, which leaves room for hope. O’Connor has a promising career ahead.”
—Sunday Times (UK)

"I absolutely adored Whale Fall. I fell completely under its spell: the quiet beauty of it, the mounting sense of loss, the subtle way that Elizabeth O'Connor handled the exploitation, betrayal and desecration of a small community. Every sentence rang with clarity and authenticity. It's a triumph."
—Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory and Circus of Wonders

“Beautiful and restrained, Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing. A novel that matches the simplicity and timelessness of the classics of island literature, reminiscent of Tomás O’Crohan or Robin Flower, it is transporting and utterly beautiful.”
—Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

From the Publisher

Gwyneth Keyworth's nuanced portrayal of Manod reveals the 18-year-old's transformative journey in this haunting story, set in 1938. Keyworth smoothly transports listeners to an isolated Welsh island and evokes the poignant interactions between Manod, a local, and the English couple, both ethnologists, who arrive to study the villagers' traditional ways. Dyfrig Morris, Gabrielle Glaister, Jot Davies, and Nick Griffiths add to the novel's ambiance with evocative renditions of folklore and historical narratives. Well-crafted sound effects, such as the crackling and echoes of an old recording machine, add a compelling layer of period authenticity. This atmospheric audiobook amplifies the novel's exploration of profound cultural differences within ostensibly similar societies. M.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

MAY 2024 - AudioFile

2024-02-17
O’Connor’s debut novel is set in 1938 on a remote island off the coast of Wales and centers Manod, an 18-year-old who has lived there her entire life.

With her fisherman father, Tad, offbeat younger sister, Llinos, and beloved dog, Elis, Manod battles the elements on the rocky outcrop to survive. Following the untimely death of their mother years prior, she feels responsible for Llinos’ upbringing. O’Connor is careful not to romanticize the island, depicting the harsh living conditions in graphic prose: “The wind makes red meat of us.” Alongside the news of increased political tension in Europe, a beached whale captivates the small, tightknit community, which is becoming increasingly conscious of its isolation. That so many families have abandoned the island for the mainland, leaving “more empty houses on the island than inhabited ones,” increases that sense of dislocation. When English ethnographers Edward and Joan arrive to document the islanders’ way of life, they enlist Manod to provide her unique insight into the project, and she begins to wonder if an academic career might provide an escape preferable to marriage. This renewed sense of possibility and appreciation for her home—“I had never looked closely at the island. I had never thought it was interesting, or beautiful”—coincides with a sensual awakening. Where her sexuality before the arrival of the scholars might appear modern—she has sex with a local boy without shame—it’s strikingly passive: “saying yes to him, kissing him, other things, made me feel slightly less peculiar than I did.” Appraising the island and herself through an outsider’s gaze seems to awaken Manod’s senses, making her acutely aware of her body and desire. As the academics set about documenting the traditions, folklores, and lifestyles of the islanders, Manod’s sense of otherness increases—with the pair exoticizing the islanders to such a degree that their research is utterly compromised. O’Connor prompts us to consider what it is to experience ourselves—and our cultures—through strangers’ eyes.

A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen.

Kirkus Reviews