Whale Fall
The heartbreaking historical fiction and BBC Between The Covers book club pick
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3.9 • 14 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A BBC 'Between the Covers' Book Club Pick
'Gorgeous and heartbreaking . . . I wept' - Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep
'I didn't want it to end' - Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
