The Whalebone Theatre: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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If you’ve enjoyed Mary Wesley’s and Nancy Mitford’s novels, then you are going to love ‘The Whalebone Theatre’. Telling the story of a landowning family with the habit of collecting bohemian hangers-on over the first half of the twentieth century, at the centre of the narrative is Christabel Seagrave, an ‘odd’ little girl who becomes a teenage amateur theatre director and then a ‘Clerk Special Duties’ during WW2. Joanna Quinn was born in London and grew up in Dorset, in the South West of England, where her debut novel The Whalebone Theatre is set. I think my issue with the book was that I am not sure what Quinn was trying to convey, exactly. The characters were great, their lives interesting, but it felt a bit scattered, not united by a theme or a specific narrative thread. But far away from the big house, as the children grow to adulthood, another story has been unfolding in the wings. And when the war finally takes centre stage, the siblings find themselves cast, unrehearsed, into roles they never expected to play. Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.

Why do you think the novel is broken into “Acts” as a structural device? How do the novel’s events map onto the typical five-part structure of a Shakespeare play? Beautifully compulsive ... The Whalebone Theatre will feel like a much-loved book even if you're reading it for the first time' Red Magazine

Sweeping family saga covering decades and set in England and France. The Seagrave family owns a country manor in Dorsetshire. The story is focused on eldest sister Cristabel, and her half siblings, Florence and Digby. This is the story of a whale that washes up on a beach, whose bones are claimed by a twelve-year-old girl with big ambitions and an even bigger imagination. An unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, fiercely determined to do things differently.

I loved the first half of the novel which was an enchanting, vibrant narrative around children and adults with all of their wealth, secrets and desires laid out in the crumbling estate. I was completely engaged in the clean descriptions, the spot-on dialogue and this entranced me completely. But that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Either they notice I’m a woman, and they don’t want me because of that, or I have to hope they somehow don’t notice, which leaves me eradicated either way.’How do the pressures of inheritance affect the Seagrave men differently --- from Jasper to Willoughby to Digby? What is inherited, and by whom, by the end of the war, regardless of gender? Like Red Bull, The Whalebone Theatre gives you wings. You fly from 1919 to 1945, from a dusty old house in Dorset where debutantes dance underneath stuffed deer heads to the oily sea off Dunkirk, where German Stukas whizz over fishing boats. Now we’re in a velvety West End theatre watching Diaghilev’s dancers leap and spin; now we’re plunging through the moonlight over occupied France as a parachute unfurls silently above a secret agent like a big white lily. Absolute aces…Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold.”— The New York Times The second chunk is more looking at the daughter she finds in the household already, and the events of one hoity-toity, plummy summer, where the estate is riddled with the foreign and the potentially lesbian and the bohemian and the bed-swapping arty types, amidst which the girl – Cristabel – decides there are enough bohemian-minded drop-outs to help her present a play. Thus slowly – oh, how cussedly slowly – we get to the title construction finally being mentioned, a third of the way through this lumbering stodge. Oh, and then it becomes a war novel.