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
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
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.
