Elizabeth O'Connor for Whale Fall

“Whale Fall is 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” - Maggie O'Farrell

“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

“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

It is 1938 and for a young woman, Manod, just turned eighteen, 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. Rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. The empty houses remind them of men the last Great War took and now they see bad omens everywhere.

When two strangers from the mainland arrive on a white boat, keen to study the island’s people, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover a life for herself. But, as she guides them across the island’s wild landscape and becomes entangled in their relationship, the outside world begins to look terrifyingly out of reach.

Elizabeth O'Connor's beautiful, devastating debut, tells a story of longing and betrayal set against the backdrop of a world in great tumult.

Elizabeth's short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize in 2020. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, on the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Whale Fall is her first novel.