Whale Fall

Author Elizabeth O'Connor
Narrator Gwyneth Keyworth
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Run Time 3 hours and 51 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Family life fiction, Historical fiction, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Environmental issues, Narrative theme: Interior life, Narrative theme: Sense of place.

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What to expect

'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 2024

The audiobook is read by Gwyneth Keyworth, and featuring, Gabrielle Glaister, Jot Davies, Dyfrig Morris and Nick Griffiths.

It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself. The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island's shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island's harsh, salt-stung landscape.

When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been searching for. But, as she guides them across the island’s cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.

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

Critics Review

Evocative and haunting . . . written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. It teems with visceral imagery
Guardian
O’Connor’s beautifully evocative debut explores the liminal spaces between aspiration and disappointment, adolescence and adulthood, land and sea
The Observer
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
The Observer, Debuts of the Year 2024
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
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
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
Mesmerising. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite
Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing . . . transporting and utterly beautiful
Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
I devoured the exquisite Whale Fall. Immersive, elegiac and silvered with salt – beautiful
Lizzie Pook, author of Maude Horton's Glorious Revenge
An evocative, slow-burn tale
The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen
Kirkus
O’Connor’s precise and spare prose feels at once claustrophobic and full of possibility, while emulating the interior of her yearning protagonist. A notable debut imbued with the pain of buried promise
Booklist
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

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