Whale Fall: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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. A novel with such presence, both wild and still: utterly exquisite

  — Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock

• 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

• [A] luminous first novel...Literary voyagers looking for new worlds should add this to their itinerary.

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• 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)

• These minimalist pages shimmer...What a testament to the capaciousness, generosity and emotional range of true art.

  — Scientific American

• 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

• 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