Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Whale Fall

Whale Fall

O'Connor, Elizabeth

Hardcover

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $27.00

ISBN10: 0593700910
ISBN13: 9780593700914
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: May 7 2024
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.70
Height: 1.00 Width: 4.90 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
Awards: ALA Notable Books
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK - 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.--Maggie Shipstead, New York Times Book Review

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 Long Island

In 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 culture, then, feels like a boon to her--both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.

With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them.

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