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2025 Longlist

Whale Fall

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ABOUT
THE BOOK

1938 and for Manod, just 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 have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. The empty houses remind them of men the last Great War took and they see bad omens everywhere. When two strangers from the mainland arrive, Manod sees a rare 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 world outside begins to look terrifyingly out of reach.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Elizabeth
O’Connor

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 debut novel.

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 debut novel.

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NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of a beautiful but almost abandoned Welsh island. The last residents of the island aren’t sure if the dead whale is a good or bad sign. For Manod, a young woman living with her father and her sister, it’s the beginning of a lifetime decision. On the one hand, she loves the island that her family called home for generations. On the other hand, Manod desires to explore life on the mainland. The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture first feels like the moment Manod had been waiting for to escape the island, but her home and the love to her family is rooted deep. The young woman begins to feel a sensual awakening about what the dead whale could personally means to her.Whale Fall is the debut novel of Elizabeth O’Connor. It paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them. With sparse prose, tempered by sharp wit, O’Connor solemnise the bound between an island and it’s people, that makes the reader think about the value of home in times when millions of people have to leave their homes.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
25/04/2024
Country
United Kingdom
Original Language
English
Publisher
Picador
Borrow this book from Libraries Ireland

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