Synopsis
‘I didn't want it to end’ - Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet
‘Gorgeous and heartbreaking . . . I wept’ - Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep
A BBC Between the Covers Book Club Pick
An Observer Best Debut of the Year
Shortlisted for the Betty Trask Award
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 brink of war.
‘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
‘Powerful . . . written with a calm, luminous precision’ - Colm Tóibín
Details
Reviews
“Gorgeous and heartbreaking . . . I wept”Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep
“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
“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 Tóibín, 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
