A New York Times Notable Book of 2024
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and NPR
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
“Both blunt and exquisite . . . O’Connor’s excellent debut . . . is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude.”
—Maggie Shipstead, New York Times Book Review
"Spare and bracing...O'Connor constructs her setting with precise, atmospheric detail that captures a world slowly being eroded....It all makes for a haunting and lucid exploration of the moments leading up to immense change."
—NPR
“In Whale Fall, the landscape and its people speak together…By rejecting nostalgia but still foregrounding landscape, Whale Fall makes space for the more intimate, surreal ways that culture can relate to nature.”
—The Nation
"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: I loved seeing the world through her eyes, and I didn’t want the novel to end"
—Maggie O'Farrell, New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet
"A haunting, unhurried, unusual debut...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, New York Times bestselling author of The Whalebone Theater
"Whale Fall is a powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy"
—Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Brooklyn and The Magician
"O’Connor’s slim, powerful debut vibrates with elemental, immediate, and palpable scenes and descriptions...O’Connor’s spare, incisive prose brings the island to vivid life."
—Boston Globe
"These minimalist pages shimmer...What a testament to the capaciousness, generosity and emotional range of true art."
—Scientific American
"I absolutely adored Whale Fall. I fell completely under its spell: the quiet beauty of it, the mounting sense of loss, the subtle way that Elizabeth O'Connor handled the exploitation, betrayal and desecration of a small community. Every sentence rang with clarity and authenticity. It's a triumph."
—Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory and Circus of Wonders
“Beautiful and restrained, Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing. A novel that matches the simplicity and timelessness of the classics of island literature, reminiscent of Tomás O’Crohan or Robin Flower, it is transporting and utterly beautiful.”
—Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
"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 Prizewinning author of The Gathering
"Mesmerizing...Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the community’s transformation. Entrancing descriptions illuminate the raw beauty of the island through seasonal changes.
—Bookpage
“O’Connor manages to extract the fullest level of excitement, introspection and drama out of each detail of her perfectly crafted work…Manod’s adventures and musings take place in a perfectly rendered island, a castaway in her own hometown. If you love seafaring, island living and off-kilter ways of surviving, Whale Fall will not let you fetishize the place or the people. It’s too good of a book for that. Hidden in a historical setting, it gives the reader a heady mix of philosophy, coming of age, relationships, toxic masculinity and gossip while holding true to its hauntingly slow and suspenseful building of those details into a beautiful, bold cautionary tale. As a debut novelist, O’Connor must be celebrated for completely overhauling the elements she uses in her storytelling, which we have seen from the likes of Isabel Allende, Edith Wharton and Toni Morrison. The way that she uses the characters’ differences to bind them to each other is nothing less than heroic. Whale Fall is a wonderful novel to be savored for all of its beauty.”
—Bookreporter
