“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.”—New York Times Book Review
"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.
“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.”—New York Times Book Review
"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.
Reviews-
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Starred review from March 25, 2024
In this luminous first novel, an isolated community of 12 families encounters a pair of outsiders on their small island off the coast of Wales in 1938. Manod, 18, lives with her lobsterman father and younger sister and sees a circumscribed future for herself on the remote and rugged island. Then a dead whale washes up on the beach. This incident is immediately followed by the arrival of an English couple, Edward and Joan, anthropologists from Oxford who have come to the island to study its inhabitants for an ethnographic paper they plan to coauthor. Manod demonstrates her ambition and intelligence to the couple, and they ask her to serve as their secretary and translator, given that few others in the community speak English. As the villagers are drawn by curiosity to the whale, which becomes a site of children’s play and a shrine to the decomposing beast, Manod falls under Joan’s spell for one reason and Edward’s for another, leading her to make some hard decisions about the life she ultimately wants to lead. The simplicity of the island folk and their daily existence is mirrored in the deceptive plainness of O’Connor’s prose and in Manod’s crystal-clear gaze. Literary voyagers looking for new worlds should add this to their itinerary. Agent: Matthew Marland, RCW Literary. -
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
