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.
Blunt and exquisite ... Brief but complete, the book is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude ... New and thrilling.
Lyrical ... Engagingly poetic — though, at times, maddeningly elliptic — the novel interweaves Manod’s canny observations with other villagers’ memories, songs, and folktales ... O’Conner’s spare, incisive prose brings the island to vivid life ... Beguiling and compelling.
Carefully measured ... O’Connor is so set against the tendency to exoticize remote places that she has made her own writing restrained and somewhat dull, stressing above all the narrowness and banality of Manod’s life.
