Whale Fall: A Novel by Elizabeth O'Connor (5/7/24)

A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one’s community“Both blunt and exquisite . . . O’Connor’s excellent debut . . .  is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude.”—New York Times Book ReviewIn 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island cul