'Why the Whales Came' is about ten-year-old Gracie Jenkins, who lives on Bryher, a small island off the western coast of Britain, in the year 1914.

He explained how he became stranded overnight on a deserted island, and that "ruined cottages stood here and there, empty, and the well I found was completely dry".

He recalls that a boat came and picked him up the next day, and later, "a woman told me that the island I'd seen was 'cursed and haunted' in the aftermath of a shipwreck, and she proceeded to relate a story much like the Birdman's".

[2] Cindy Darling from the School Library Journal said the books "masterful use of parallelism heightens the sense of drama, and Morpurgo's language is lean, yet lyrical; his descriptive paragraphs let readers taste the salt of the sea and feel the grit of the islander's lives".

[3] British writer Daniel Hahn wrote in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, that "set amidst the hardship of living on a small island, with a story that encompasses all the fear people felt in 1914, local legend, the power of guilt, and the strength of friendship, this is one of Morpurgo's most powerful and emotional books".

[5] In 2001 it was adapted into a stage play by Greg Banks and Nikki Sved of Theatre Alibi, which had its debut at the Midlands Arts Centre.

She opined that "as in the best stage adaptations, the raw material is very good, the playing style is very simple - the precariousness of the children's misadventure on a foggy sea at night is brilliantly evoked with a seesaw plank of wood - and a comic interlude in which the islanders get the better of the law is ingeniously handled".