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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
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I devoured the exquisite Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor. Immersive, elegiac and silvered with salt, it follows a young woman, Manod, and what happens when two anthropologists arrive to study the isolated island community she calls home. Beautiful.
— Lizzie Pook, author of Moonlight and The Pearler's Daughter
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Mesmerizing. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite
— Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
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O’Connor prompts us to consider what it is to experience ourselves—and our cultures—through strangers’ eyes. A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen.
— Kirkus Reviews
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[A] luminous first novel...Literary voyagers looking for new worlds should add this to their itinerary.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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O'Connor's precise and spare prose feels...full of possibility, while emulating the interior of her yearning protagonist. A notable debut imbued with the pain of buried promise
— Booklist (starred review)
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These minimalist pages shimmer...What a testament to the capaciousness, generosity and emotional range of true art.
— Scientific American
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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
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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