Whale Fall

Evocative and haunting . . . written with a care and restraint that is rare in a debut novel. It teems with visceral imagery -- Jude Cook * Guardian *
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 * The Observer *
'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' -- Maggie Shipstead * New York Times *
A beautifully nuanced, beguiling first novel, which leaves room for hope. O’Connor has a promising career ahead * The Times *
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 -- Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait
An exquisite, evocative coming-of-age story that takes place in a world on the cusp of great change * The Observer, Debuts of the Year 2024 *
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, author of The Magician and Brooklyn
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 Prize winning author of The Wren, the Wren
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 * Daily Mail *
I absolutely adored Whale Fall, I fell completely under its spell. Every sentence rang with clarity and authenticity. It's a triumph -- Elizabeth Macneal, bestselling author of The Doll Factory
This poised debut balances betrayal and loss with change and self-realisation * Mail on Sunday *
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 -- Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre
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 * Boston Globe *
Mesmerising. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite -- Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
Whale Fall moves like a tide, ebbing and flowing . . . transporting and utterly beautiful -- Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
I devoured the exquisite Whale Fall. Immersive, elegiac and silvered with salt - beautiful -- Lizzie Pook, author of Maude Horton's Glorious Revenge
An evocative, slow-burn tale * The Bookseller, Editor's Choice *
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen * Kirkus *
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 * Booklist *
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 * Michigan Daily *
[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 * Crack Magazine *
Slender but vibrant, like a watercolour painted outside * Perspective *