Whale Fall
Elizabeth O'Connor
Whale Fall
Elizabeth O'Connor
Hardback / bound
|
English
€19.95
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Description
A haunting, atmospheric novel about desire, duty and broken promises among an island community caught in the wave of history as Europe falls into war.
Evocative and haunting . . . written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. It teems with visceral imagery
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 . . . To different eyes, the same island might look like a prison or a romantic enclave, but to actually apprehend the truth of a place or person requires patience, nuanced attention and the painstaking accrual of details. Understanding is hard work, O’Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book’s end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing . . . transporting and utterly beautiful
I devoured the exquisite Whale Fall. Immersive, elegiac and silvered with salt - beautiful
An evocative, slow-burn tale
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen
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
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
[O'Connor] conjures up a mood of things on the cusp: adulthood, the end of a community, and, given the time it’s set, war. It’s also a period when competing ideologies froth and broil against each other, and O’Connor captures all this, and more, in the subtlest of shades
Slender but vibrant, like a watercolour painted outside
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.
Evocative and haunting . . . written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. It teems with visceral imagery
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 . . . To different eyes, the same island might look like a prison or a romantic enclave, but to actually apprehend the truth of a place or person requires patience, nuanced attention and the painstaking accrual of details. Understanding is hard work, O’Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book’s end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing . . . transporting and utterly beautiful
I devoured the exquisite Whale Fall. Immersive, elegiac and silvered with salt - beautiful
An evocative, slow-burn tale
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen
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
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
[O'Connor] conjures up a mood of things on the cusp: adulthood, the end of a community, and, given the time it’s set, war. It’s also a period when competing ideologies froth and broil against each other, and O’Connor captures all this, and more, in the subtlest of shades
Slender but vibrant, like a watercolour painted outside
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.