Whale Fall

The heartbreaking historical fiction and BBC Between The Covers book club pick

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Whale Fall

By: Elizabeth O'Connor

Narrated by: Gwyneth Keyworth

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About this listen

Including poems specially adapted into melody and song for this audiobook.

One of The New York Times Best Audiobooks of 2024
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 Tóibín
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

20th Century

Coming of Age

Family Life

Genre Fiction

Historical

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Heartfelt

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Critic reviews

Evocative and haunting . . . written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. It teems with visceral imagery (Jude Cook)

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

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 (Maggie Shipstead)

A beautifully nuanced, beguiling first novel, which leaves room for hope. O’Connor has a promising career ahead

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

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)

A delicate piece of fiction, otherworldly in theme, supple and assured in prose. It feels rooted in its historical setting . . . yet forwards looking in its concerns

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

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

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

Mesmerising. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite (Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock)

Most relevant

I wasn’t sure about this story But I carried on with it. If it had been much longer I would have nit finished it.
The interjection of poems. Songs etc was good