Whale Fall

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20th century wales
A01=Elizabeth O'Connor
affair
Author_Elizabeth O'Connor
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Category=FV
Category=FXB
Category=FXE
Category=FXM
Category=FXR
coming of age
desire
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
ethnography
historical fiction
island
isolated community
secret
world war
world war 2 books
ww2

Product details

  • ISBN 9781035024766
  • Weight: 158g
  • Dimensions: 129 x 197mm
  • Publication Date: 03 Apr 2025
  • Publisher: Pan Macmillan
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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‘I didn't want it to end’ - Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet

‘Gorgeous and heartbreaking . . . I wept’ - Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep

A BBC Between the Covers Book Club Pick
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

Elizabeth O’Connor lives in Birmingham. Her 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.

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