A predictable but absorbing debut novel straddling the popular tropes of the family saga, the country house, putting on a show (or three) and WWII special operations activities. Plus a few creative writing hacks that add additional viewpoints and quirkiness and are fun to discover along the way.Overall though - and in spite of its careful research and fine writing - ‘The Whalebone Theatre’ is a long road of uneven and unnecessary length that eventually detracts from the whole. But there’s still ...

I picked this up without any expectations and came away feeling like I'd spent years with this vibrant fictional family. The coming-of-age section was my favorite, and Ms. Quinn did a wonderful job portraying the pains and pageantry of childhood on an English country estate. The war section felt very real and allowed the reader to see sides of the characters we'd never seen before. Ultimately, we're left with people who've been wounded by life but still believe in hope, love, and the magic of st...

What a truly fantastic book. Powerful, moving, beautifully written, so compelling, with such fantastic characterisation. Definitely a favourite of the year.

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 Jas...

No words. It’s over. Thank God.

Oh God. This is one of those books which makes me never want to write another novel, because what is the point when prose as beautiful as this exists? Joanna Quinn, I love you and hate you in equal measure.

DNF. After taking an age to get to 25%, I put this book aside. If you love period drama and quirky characters a à la Still Life by Sarah Winman, you might enjoy this book more than I did. Downton Abbey meets Nancy Mitford (I know the author is not keen on the Downton Abbey comparison but it’s unavoidable), it needed an injection of pace, a good edit (it’s 546 pages) and a stronger plot. I love a chunky book but it’s got to hold my attention and this one didn’t - it put me in a slump. Perhaps jus...

Joanna Quinn’s debut’s an interwar, family saga that runs from the 1920s through to the end of WW2. It follows the fortunes of an upper-middle-class, Dorset family, the Seagraves. It opens with the second marriage of stolid, middle-aged, widower Jasper Seagrave to much younger, frivolous socialite Rosalind, whose prospects of a better marriage were blighted by WW1. The narrative moves between Jasper, Rosalind, Jasper’s daughter Christa (Christabel), and her profligate uncle Willoughby – once his...

there is no bigger treat to me than a book in the middle of the "coming of age" "interwar period" "crumbling stately home" venn diagram, i have read many and consider myself a picky little connoisseur, but this delivered on basically every single level! the prose was evocative and lovely, it was charming and held delight but the characters felt real and were completely themselves, and despite fitting into a type i love it never ever felt like a pastiche or knock off which is SUCH an achievement....

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, immediatel...