
Whale Fall
A Novel
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About this listen
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.
©2024 Elizabeth O'Connor (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Notable Book of 2024
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and NPR
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
“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
"Spare and bracing...O'Connor constructs her setting with precise, atmospheric detail that captures a world slowly being eroded....It all makes for a haunting and lucid exploration of the moments leading up to immense change."—NPR
“In Whale Fall, the landscape and its people speak together…By rejecting nostalgia but still foregrounding landscape, Whale Fall makes space for the more intimate, surreal ways that culture can relate to nature.”—The Nation
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Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures
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Would give six stars if possible
- By love it on 08-31-24
By: Anne Michaels
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Enlightenment
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Perry
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.
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Oddly uncompelling
- By mary on 06-16-24
By: Sarah Perry
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The Fraud
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
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Very disappointing
- By Happy purchaser on 09-10-23
By: Zadie Smith
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This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
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Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
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Scaffolding
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Elkin
- Narrated by: Lauren Elkin
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Two couples in two separate but similar times-set against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy-face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes hold communal memories of all their inhabitants and their stories; about the bonds we create, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways people we've loved live on in us.
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Wonderful
- By Laura M on 11-14-24
By: Lauren Elkin
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The Coast Road
- A Novel
- By: Alan Murrin
- Narrated by: Jessica Regan
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set in 1994, The Coast Road tells the story of two women—Izzy Keaveney, a housewife, and Colette Crowley, a poet. Colette has left her husband and sons for a married man in Dublin. When she returns to her home in County Donegal to try to pick up the pieces of her old life, her husband, Shaun, a successful businessman, denies her access to her children.
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Fabulous
- By Suzanna on 06-13-24
By: Alan Murrin
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Black River
- By: Nilanjana Roy
- Narrated by: Sharmila Devar
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Teetapur, an unassuming village just a few hours outside of bustling Delhi, is famous for nothing—until one of its children, eight-year-old Munia, is found dead, hanging from the branch of a Jamun tree. In the largely Hindu village, suspicion quickly falls on an itinerant Muslim man, Mansoor. Suspicion ignites like wildfire, fueled by religious tensions that simmer beneath the surface.
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Good but not a mystery
- By ascot on 10-11-24
By: Nilanjana Roy
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Someone Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth.
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Horrible Narration, ok storyl
- By bkwrm1 on 05-11-25
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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The Coin
- A Novel
- By: Yasmin Zaher
- Narrated by: Sarah Agha
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
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Interview of author on podcast piqued interest
- By amybarnard on 08-03-24
By: Yasmin Zaher
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Rejection
- Fiction
- By: Tony Tulathimutte
- Narrated by: Micky Shiloah, Allyson Ryan, Quincy Surasmith, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
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Trigger warning for one chapter, otherwise really creative
- By Amazon Customer on 10-06-24
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Floreana
- A Novel
- By: Midge Raymond
- Narrated by: Abigail Reno, Elisabeth Lagelee
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After ten years away to build a family, Mallory returns to Floreana Island in the Galápagos, and to Gavin, the mentor with whom she had a long-ago affair. Their project is to build nests to revive the vulnerable penguin population. But Mallory doesn’t dare tell Gavin why she’s really come back. Then she discovers old journals hidden in a lava cave—confessions of another woman who needed to disappear.
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fascinating insight into the history of the islands
- By Linda Elmquist on 12-14-24
By: Midge Raymond
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The Café with No Name
- By: Robert Seethaler, Katy Derbyshire - translator
- Narrated by: Rob Jones
- Length: 5 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived. The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal.
By: Robert Seethaler, and others
Loss of innocence and disillusionment beautifully told
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beautiful
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The writing was beautiful, the characters richly described, a very good listrn.
The rhythm of the language matched the storytelling.
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Beautiful, Dreary, and Real
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Unusual, powerful story
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Compelling story, superbly performed
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Poetic and Musical
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Outstanding-- lyrical and evocative
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Fabulous narration!
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Short but powerful
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