Whale Fall

Starred review from March 25, 2024
In this luminous first novel, an isolated community of 12 families encounters a pair of outsiders on their small island off the coast of Wales in 1938. Manod, 18, lives with her lobsterman father and younger sister and sees a circumscribed future for herself on the remote and rugged island. Then a dead whale washes up on the beach. This incident is immediately followed by the arrival of an English couple, Edward and Joan, anthropologists from Oxford who have come to the island to study its inhabitants for an ethnographic paper they plan to coauthor. Manod demonstrates her ambition and intelligence to the couple, and they ask her to serve as their secretary and translator, given that few others in the community speak English. As the villagers are drawn by curiosity to the whale, which becomes a site of children’s play and a shrine to the decomposing beast, Manod falls under Joan’s spell for one reason and Edward’s for another, leading her to make some hard decisions about the life she ultimately wants to lead. The simplicity of the island folk and their daily existence is mirrored in the deceptive plainness of O’Connor’s prose and in Manod’s crystal-clear gaze. Literary voyagers looking for new worlds should add this to their itinerary. Agent: Matthew Marland, RCW Literary.