Tag: HF Reading Challenge

Book Review – Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor

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About the Book

It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself.

The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island’s shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island’s harsh, salt-stung landscape.

When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, keen to study the island’s people, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been yearning for. But, as she guides them across the island’s cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.

Format: Hardcover (224 pages) Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 25th April 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Shortlisted for the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025, Whale Fall is a quietly seductive novel that immerses you in the life of a small, remote community. Even twenty years after the end of the First World War, the islanders are still living in its shadow. Many young men left the island to join up but never returned, either killed in action or because they have made a new life on the mainland. Remnants of the war – uniforms, helmets, fragments of naval mines – even still wash up on the shore.

Those that remain on the island scrape a living from traditional activities such as farming and fishing. The island, although beautiful, is a harsh environment in which to live especially when winter storms pummel its coastline and it is cut off from the mainland. The beached whale decaying on the shoreline seems a metaphor for the island’s decline.

Manod has spent her whole life on the island. Her father is a fisherman and the uncertain nature of his occupation means they lead a hand-to-mouth existence. Following the death of their mother, Manod has taken on the role of caring for her young sister. Although she is devoted to her, it’s something that ties her to the island leaving her increasingly frustrated that life is passing her by. Days unfold much as they always have. ‘Reverend Jones’s sermon took its usual path. Prosperous fishing must be prayed for, a trade with a proper godly life, then the shipping forecast for the coming week.’

Because of its remoteness, the outside world barely impinges on island life, until that is the prospect of war looms once again, as well as the arrival of two anthropologists, Joan and Edward, who want to study the islanders’ way of life. As one of the few English speakers on the island, Manod is employed to translate the stories they collect from the islanders. The relationship she forms with them leads her to believe this is the opportunity she has longed for: to make a new life for herself away from the island, to experience things she has only read about in books, and perhaps to find love.

Increasingly, though, she gains the impression they are not interested in portraying the reality of island life but some imagined, sanitised version they’d arrived at even before they set foot on the island. As she says to Joan, ‘The island that’s in your head. I don’t think it exists.’ Irritation at their dismissive attitudes, factual inaccuracies and staged photographs turns to disillusionment and, ultimately, a feeling of betrayal.

There is a haunting quality to Whale Fall in its depiction of a way of life slowly dying in the face of the intrusion of the modern world. I found the conflict Manod feels between her responsibilties and her quiet desperation for a more fulfilling life intensely moving.

In three words: Intimate, atmospheric, evocative
Try something similar: The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford

About the Author

Elizabeth O’Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize in 2020. She has a Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Birmingham on the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Whale Fall is her first novel. (Photo: Instagram profile)

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Book Review – A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

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About the Book

A Granite Silence is an exploration – a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father.

Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here are Helen’s the Topps, the Josses, the Mitchells, the Gordons, the Donalds, the Coulls and the Hunts.

Returning home from school for her midday meal, Helen is sent by her mother Agnes to buy a loaf from the bakery at the end of the street. Agnes never sees her daughter alive again.

Nina Allan explores the aftermath of Helen’s disappearance, turning a probing eye to the close-knit neighbourhood – where everyone knows everyone, at least by sight – and with subtlety and sympathy, explores the intricate layers of truth and falsehood that can coexist in one moment of history.

Format: ebook (352 pages) Publisher: riverrun
Publication date: 10th April 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

In A Granite Silence the author takes a very different approach from many other historical novels based on true crime cases. Although, in fictional form, the facts of the case from the crime itself through the investigation, identification of the culprit and eventual trial are described, there’s great inventiveness in the way this is done.

The author takes the reader on a series of journeys exploring the social environment, the early lives of Helen’s mother and father, as well as those who interact in various ways with the Priestly family such as neighbours, teachers, etc. These are a combination of fact and fiction in varying degrees. In some cases they are almost completely a flight of the author’s imagination perhaps sparked by a particular real life character, an object or event.

As well as the author’s own commentary on her research, three other female characters with an interest in the case appear, a theme common to all being that of digression. There’s Rose, a journalist who moves into an Aberdeen apartment hoping to write a book about the Priestly case but who becomes intrigued by the story of the apartment’s previous occupant. Then there’s Pearl who, like the author, has set out to write a historical novel about Helen’s death but becomes distracted by the need to resolve a personal mystery. Lastly there’s Susana, a Russian author for whom the Priestly case inspires a work of experimental fiction.

I admired the author’s inventive approach although there were times the book went off at too much of a tangent for me and I struggled with its disjointed structure. For example, I confess to skimming a lengthy chapter about Robert Burns’s epic poem Tam o’ Shanter just because Helen wore a blue tam o’shanter hat. Characters come and go, some storylines finish in dead ends and the narrative moves back and forth in time. That’s either going to spark your interest or test your powers of concentration, possibly your patience.

As the investigation progresses, particularly the forensic analysis, details of the crime emerge that are shocking in nature. Is it prurient to want to know this sort of detail? Would we, like so many people at the time, jump to a conclusion about the person responsible? Would we treat a refusal to answer questions – the ‘granite silence’ of the book’s title – as evidence of guilt?

At one point, the author acknowledges her desire for knowledge, albeit in a different context but I think applicable to her approach in this book. ‘As always, I want to know more. I want to discover the personalities and predicaments at the heart of the case, to get to know their history at a level that does them justice.’

A Granite Silence is not a novel with a linear structure. Think of it more as an exploration of the different ways in which true crime stories can be told.

In three words: Inventive, discursive, original
Try something similar: The Mouthless Dead by Anthony Quinn

About the Author

Author photo by Diana Patient

Nina Allan is a novelist and critic. In 2018 she was named as one of the Guardian‘s Fresh Voices: 50 Writers You Should Read Now. She is the recipient of the British Science Fiction Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle and the Grand Prix de L’imaginaire. In 2025 her novel The Good Neighbours was awarded the Prix Medicis Etranger. Her most recent novel is A Granite Silence, a historical true crime mystery. The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, written together with her husband Christopher Priest, is published by Bloomsbury Continuum in 2026.

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