The Tearoom Library, No. 060 — Whale Fall
Featuring an exclusive interview with Elizabeth O'Connor and a Note from the Margins on protecting your own story.
The Tearoom Library, No. 060 — Whale Fall
Author: Elizabeth O’Connor
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
Rating: ★★★★★
Recommended Reading:
Isola by Allegra Goodman — Inspired by the true story of a young woman abandoned on a remote island, this novel explores survival, memory, faith, and the ways a life can be shaped by the stories others tell about it. Read my review here!
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman — Set on a remote island lighthouse, this moving novel explores isolation, grief, love, and the impossible choices people make when longing and loss collide. Like Whale Fall, it captures the emotional weight of life in a place shaped by the sea.
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver — A richer, more expansive exploration of the natural world, but it shares Whale Fall’s fascination with the fragile relationship between humans, animals, and the ecosystems around them.
A Land Far Away
Some novels ask what happens when we leave home. Others ask what happens when outsiders arrive. How are we supposed to react when people we do not know suddenly enter our lives—and, perhaps most troublingly, decide what our customs mean?
On the other hand, do we not invite people into our realities every day when we share pieces of ourselves online? When we post a photograph or update a status, we are often offering others a carefully chosen version of the truth. Perhaps one of humanity’s most enduring traits is our curiosity about the lives of others.
Another truth, however, is that humans crave discovery. We are capable of creating stories, exaggerations, and even outright lies in order to transform ordinary lives into something extraordinary. Elizabeth O’Connor’s short but poignant novel, Whale Fall, explores both of these questions. It is a story about ambition, belonging, and the ways vulnerable communities can be misunderstood by those who claim they want to preserve them.
When I reached for Whale Fall last month, it became one of those rare books I simply could not put down. It possesses an atmosphere that draws the reader inward. The last time I experienced this particular feeling was while reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Like Whale Fall, Piranesi asks us to question our understanding of reality while creating a world so vivid that it feels almost tangible.
It is not often that I encounter stories with this kind of magic—the kind that invites a reader to linger between the lines. I am always curious about the writers who can create such an effect, so I decided to reach out to Elizabeth O’Connor with a few questions about her novel. She responded enthusiastically, and I was grateful for the opportunity to learn more about what inspired Whale Fall.
You can read the interview here.
What inspired this story? Why does it still feel relevant today? Although the island in Whale Fall is fictional, Elizabeth O’Connor told me that it was inspired by several real Welsh islands that were once inhabited before gradually being abandoned. Rather than recreating one place exactly, she drew from the histories and atmosphere of many communities whose stories have quietly slipped from public memory. That sense of disappearance hangs over every page of the novel.
Impossible to Ignore
We sometimes convince ourselves that people from different communities are fundamentally unlike us. Yet a different language, landscape, or tradition does not mean that others do not value the same things we do: family, survival, belonging, and the small details that make a life worth living.
Whale Fall paints a rich portrait of a village that, while disconnected from the mainland, is not as different from mainlanders as they would like to believe. Set in 1938, the story follows Manod, a young woman living with her father and younger sister on a small island off the Welsh coast.
The world has already begun to change around this island. Many of Manod’s friends have left for opportunities on the mainland. They have decided they want lives different from the struggles of a fishing village. They leave in pursuit of land, education, and the hope of becoming more than their parents managed to be.
Manod does not want to admit that she, too, would like to leave. It is her love for her father and sister that keeps her on the island’s shores. She cannot bear the thought of abandoning them, though she constantly stares out at the sea, wondering what exists beyond it.
Until one day, beyond comes to meet her.
The novel opens when a whale carcass washes ashore, a great spectacle that shatters the monotony of the islanders’ routine. Not long after this event, two English ethnographers arrive. They come hoping to document what they believe is a disappearing way of life.
Because Manod speaks English, she becomes their translator, helping them interview her neighbors and record their customs, stories, and traditions. At first, she is happy to help, naively believing that the visitors are honest about their intentions. They even promise to take her back with them when they return.
It soon becomes clear that there is something not quite transparent about their purpose. Is it too late, though, for her to change her mind?
The Ethics of Storytelling
In our interview, O’Connor spoke about the delicate balance of writing a fictional island grounded in real history. I noted that Manod is written as both a participant and an observer, and asked what O’Connor hoped to achieve with this.
She responded:
“I wanted the shoreline landscape to shape the people on the island and, thematically, the novel, and in the same way the shore is not-land, but also not-water, Manod is both part of the island’s rich past and its disappearing future, ambitious and held by domestic obligation, using and being used by the visitors. She sits in a kind of in-between space.”
An in-between place. Are we not all living in such a space?
The changes shaping our lives might not be as obvious as those transforming Manod’s world, but within the span of a year—or even a month—all that we know can shift and morph into something unfamiliar. The difference is that we do not have ethnographers arriving to examine us. We offer information freely.
I wonder what Manod would think if she saw our social media today.
The Whale We Can’t Ignore
As the story unfolds, Whale Fall begins asking more difficult questions. What happens when one community attempts to tell another community’s story? Can documentation become another form of exploitation? Is curiosity always generous, or can it conceal a desire to categorize, possess, and ultimately profit from the lives of others?
The islanders are observed, photographed, interviewed, and translated, yet they are not always seen as fully human. Their words pass through outsiders who believe they understand these lives better than the people living them. The result is a subtle but devastating reminder that stories can be reshaped by those who hold the pen.
In my interview, I asked O’Connor what it was about these islands that inspired her to write about such a community. She replied:
“There is a recent essay by the landscape historian John R. Gillis which typifies different kinds of people on a shore: those who live on the shore and those who live with it. That line really captured my imagination, thinking about what it means to be tied to a place, what it means to be a visitor.”
O’Connor described immersing herself in their history while remaining conscious that she was writing from imagination rather than direct experience. That thoughtfulness is reflected throughout the novel. Whale Fall never claims ownership over its subjects. Instead, it continually asks who has the right to tell another person’s story.
It also uses subtle elements of folklore to give a distinct face to the Welsh community.
She explained:
“I was interested in how folktales are used to make sense of parts of the world we don’t understand – they are often about death, birth, natural phenomena, transformation – and they come off as magical because they concern themselves with the world’s mysteries.”
Manod herself is caught between worlds. She longs for opportunity beyond the island, yet cannot abandon the people she loves. As translator, she occupies an uneasy space between loyalty and ambition, becoming both witness and participant in the changing fortunes of her community.
Whale Fall is a beautifully quiet novel about identity, memory, and the stories that survive after places begin to disappear. It reminds us that preserving a culture is not the same as possessing it. Communities deserve more than to be documented—they deserve to speak for themselves.
The novel raises larger questions than I could fit into the review itself. In today’s Note from the Margins, I explore what Whale Fall taught me about historical memory, cultural preservation, and why protecting our own stories has never mattered more.
A Note from the Margins
The pages of Whale Fall stayed with me long after I finished reading, not only because of the island it portrays, but because of the questions it asks about memory and the stories we choose to preserve.
There is a famous saying that history is written by the victors.
Last year, I began an American history reading project, and one lesson has surfaced again and again: the stories we inherit often depend upon who was allowed to tell them. Consider the Salem Witch Trials, where testimony, fear, and rumor became accepted as truth with devastating consequences.
Or consider Mary Todd Lincoln, whose legacy has long been filtered through accounts that emphasized instability while rarely asking equally difficult questions about the people around her—including her husband.
I consider the role of storyteller to be sacred because the way we record events—and the sources we choose to trust—can build or destroy a person’s, or even an entire community’s, reputation for generations.
Elizabeth O’Connor’s novel serves as a quiet but unforgettable warning, not only to those who tell stories but also to those who entrust their stories to strangers. Once our experiences leave our hands, we lose control over the shape they will take. Someone else may decide what matters, what can be omitted, and what deserves to be believed.
Throughout the novel, Manod believes she is preserving something precious. She translates her people’s songs, guides visitors along the shore, and even shares her own artwork, only to watch it be appropriated and exploited.
There have always been people willing to profit from another person’s trust. By the novel’s end, Manod has reclaimed her own sense of dignity, but the English researchers have departed. They carry her community’s stories away with them, transformed into something that serves their own purposes rather than the people who lived them.
That leaves us with one final question. If a story has been stripped of its context, reshaped to suit an outsider’s expectations, and presented without fidelity to the people who lived it, is it still the truth—or has it become something else?
Protecting Your Story
It is important to know one’s own story. Even if a person is not a trained author, even if they never aspire to write a novel, there is value in understanding the history that shaped them.
Stories were carried orally for centuries before they were written down. When we know our own history and culture, we are better equipped to answer questions, challenge misconceptions, and recognize when someone else has mistaken—or deliberately distorted—the truth.
Of course, we can only do so much once our stories enter the world. In the age of the internet, they can spread far beyond our control, reshaped by strangers or reduced to something we scarcely recognize. We cannot always determine how our stories will be received, but we can take responsibility for how we tell them in the first place.
Whale Fall reminds us that every community has stories worth preserving, but not every outsider is prepared to preserve them faithfully. Elizabeth O’Connor has written a novel about one small island, yet its questions echo far beyond its shores.
Who gets to tell history? Who is believed? And what is lost when a voice is translated through someone else’s ambitions?
After I closed the book, I found myself thinking less about the island itself than about the people history leaves behind. Perhaps that is Whale Fall‘s greatest achievement: it asks us not simply to listen to forgotten voices, but to consider whether we have truly heard them at all.