Manod is 18. The Welsh teen has never left the island on which she was born. The year is 1938, everyone on the island (all 200+ inhabitants) wear the fashions that had come into style 20 years earlier, and the whispers about the world soon falling apart merely make it to their ears. In WHALE FALL, a whale washes up on the beach, and immediately the worry that it harbors bad luck begins to make its way through the town gossip.

"The way that [O'Connor] uses the characters’ differences to bind them to each other is nothing less than heroic. WHALE FALL is a wonderful novel to be savored for all of its beauty."

Manod is responsible for her little sister since their mother died, and her father, Ted, is a grouchy, toxically masculine fisherman who doubts everyone on the island. As far as the rest of the world goes, he couldn’t care less. But after the whale keeps coming ashore on different parts of the coastline, Joan and Edward --- two intrepid ethnographers from England --- arrive to investigate the whale, as well as the island. Is this Manod’s opportunity to find someone who can help her escape the dreary seaside and take her to London? As she grows in confidence and knowledge thanks to her association with the English couple, Manod begins to see her life and her fantasies in a whole new way.

An award-winning short story writer, Elizabeth O’Connor manages to extract the fullest level of excitement, introspection and drama out of each detail of her perfectly crafted work. Told in short blasts of chapters, the tale explained to the reader by Manod in her own self-aware way, WHALE FALL is a long poem about the crossing of cultures and people that often leads to life-changing experiences. But O’Connor’s clean prose does belie the occasional extravagance of Manod’s feelings about the life she was born into and the one she hopes to escape into: “People on the mainland barely know the island is here; maybe they glimpse it on a clear day but they don’t think about it, and certainly don’t think about visiting.”

However, Joan and Edward are more than prepared to immerse themselves in the Welsh culture when they are there. Armed with some information and a slight ability in the language, they want to fit right in. But will the island accept them and their work?

Manod’s adventures and musings take place in a perfectly rendered island, a castaway in her own hometown. If you love seafaring, island living and off-kilter ways of surviving, WHALE FALL will not let you fetishize the place or the people. It’s too good of a book for that. Hidden in a historical setting, it gives the reader a heady mix of philosophy, coming of age, relationships, toxic masculinity and gossip while holding true to its hauntingly slow and suspenseful building of those details into a beautiful, bold cautionary tale.

As a debut novelist, O’Connor must be celebrated for completely overhauling the elements she uses in her storytelling, which we have seen from the likes of Isabel Allende, Edith Wharton and Toni Morrison. The way that she uses the characters’ differences to bind them to each other is nothing less than heroic. WHALE FALL is a wonderful novel to be savored for all of its beauty.