The Whalebone Theatre: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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But his mind seemed unable to keep company with the fact he was dead. It was desperate, laughable, and in the face of such nonsense, his mind kept jumping up and scampering off to its favourite haunts. Even as he was walking behind his coffin with little Cristabel holding his hand, he was trying to remember the name of a lissom Italian actress he’d met in Covent Garden. 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? I find myself unable to critique the last few acts of the novel, because they are so absorbing that I abandoned my critical reader and surrendered to wholehearted emotional entanglement with the novel and the characters. I also feel that I can't say too much about the penultimate acts because I'd be giving away (even the smallest) secrets that need to be lived through as they are read, with immediacy. I will say that, having finished the novel just this moment, I am simultaneously wrung out and filled up. Pas helemaal op het einde - na 500 bladzijden - heeft Quinn je hélemaal te pakken, maar dan is het helaas te laat.

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. My ideal novel . . . Quinn creates a worldso rich with observation, detail, humanity, and heartthat you are incapable of doing anything butdrinking it in with greedy delight.” — YOU magazine I quite like the experimental layout of the type during some key scenes, though some readers may balk at it. There are also some lovingly acute descriptions of nature, like the ‘sea foam popping on pebbles’ on the shore. Welcome to Chilcombe, "a many-gabled, many chimneyed, ivy-covered manor house with an elephantine air of weary grandeur...it has huddled on a wooden cliff overhanging the ocean for four hundred years." At this Dorset estate in the year 1919, Cristabel Seagrave awaited the arrival of her new mother, Rosalind, "a poised London debutante." Jasper Seagrave, widower, sought a young wife to provide an heir for Chilcombe. After the Great War and a shortage of suitable husbands, Rosalind settled for Jasper.

Discuss the way that Taras sparks the children’s creativity and imagination. How does he complicate the male presence in their lives up until that point? Love inspires art, but not only love. Art inspires art. Anger, hatred, hunger—these can also inspire. But whatever it is, however it comes, there always is the work. The work of art is never done. Even when my hands are empty, I am still painting.” 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. This is a great book about a whale that washes up on the shore of the English Channel. And they build a Theatre from the bones. It is Taras who encourages Cristabel to cultivate her artistic inclinations and put on a play. This initiates one of the book’s themes of play-acting, which runs right through from Rosalind, valiantly pretending to be a happy wife and mother, to the English agents in the second world war, when a far more serious pretence is required from those parachuted in to occupied France. Quinn hammers this home a little too hard at times – “My new uniform is quite the best costume I’ve ever worn,” Digby writes in 1939 – but it’s a pleasing device.

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.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. Destined to become a classic. . .Elegantly writtenandtotally immersive, this is escapism fiction at its very best . . . Quinn’s debut is awonder.” — Daily Mail You know, I've never taken to the idea that books can be too white, too middle-class and too, well, sort of First World Problem-y. This is the novel to convert many like me, however, and in throwing a historical light on a certain sort of problem, it's even further removed from life as we know it. The first chunk concerns Rosalind, a second and younger wife to a landed gent down in SW England; we discover he lost his first wife, to whom he was perfectly suited, in childbirth, and now, immediately post-World War One, with suitable men low on the ground, Rosalind has had to settle for the lumpen codger. She's there (a) to present him with an heir, if not a spare as well, which she will eventually – oh, how eventually – stumble her way to doing, and (b) for us to see that upper class, society women of the time had surprisingly little autonomy, freedom and self-awareness. Tell us something we didn't know, then. What do we learn about Cristabel and Digby through their letters, sent and unsent? What’s unique about their relationship, including Cristabel’s notion that she “willed [him] into being” (524)? In what ways does war, and generally the threat of death, create the conditions for love to blossom throughout the novel? Consider the relationships between Rosalind and Jasper (and Willoughby), Cristabel and Leon, Flossie and George, and Digby and Jean-Marc. Which of those pairs do you think would have been possible in other contexts?