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In the autumn of 1938, the narrator, Manod, is 18 and a lifelong inhabitant of an unnamed three-mile-square Welsh island, population 47, where people eke out a subsistence by fishing and farming. Manod lives with her father, a lobster fisherman, and her younger sister, Llinos, who, in one of the book’s many small mysteries, might have some kind of cognitive impairment or might just be eccentric. The first outside presence to disrupt life on the island is a baleen whale that washes up on the beach. “A few older people said it was some kind of omen,” Manod says, “though could not agree on whether it was good or bad.” Not long after the whale’s arrival, human interlopers arrive in the form of Edward and Joan, English researchers making an ethnographic study of the island, who quickly hire Manod as an assistant and translator. Understanding is hard work, O’Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book’s end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve."