text: Joanna Quinn is the author of the bestselling debut novel The Whalebone Theatre (2022). Grown up in Dorset, where she still lives, she has worked in journalism and the charity sector, and she teaches creative writing. She is also a short-story writer, published by The White Review and Comma Press, among others.
  Joanna Quinn
  The Whalebone Theatre
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  Jenna Bush Hager
  Read With Jenna
  Dorset Coast
  Inspiration For The Whalebone Theatre
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  Athelhampton House
  Inspiration For The Whalebone Theatre
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  Zoe Curnow – Executive Director
  On The Minack Theatre
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  The Whalebone Theatre
  Book Extract
  Boscombe Whale
  Inspiration For The Whalebone Theatre
  The Dorset Echo, 1998
  Article by Joanna Quinn
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  The Dorset Museum
  On Flossie Seagrave and Dorset Women During the War
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  US Troops in an English Village
  Imperial War Museum
  Nancy Wake
  Female Undercover Agent of World War II
  Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris
  Inspiration For The Whalebone Theatre
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  The Whalebone Theatre
  Book Extract
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  Joanna Quinn
  In conversation with Jenna Bush Hager
  Online Exclusives
  Joanna Quinn in conversation with Jenna Bush Hager
  Instagram Live
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  The Dorset Museum
  On the Fate of Stately Homes in Dorset
  Featured book by Joanna Quinn
  The Whalebone Theatre
  Despite her adverse circumstances, young Cristabel Seagrave has big dreams for her life and is determined to write her own story. When a whale washes up on the Dorset shore, she plants her flag, and the inanimate carcass becomes the stage for Cristabel, Flossie and Digby’s imaginative plays, while her step-parents are distracted by an endless parade of party guests. But as the war approaches, the now grown-up children will find out that the roles they are expected to play are no longer those they hoped…
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  The Secret Garden
  By Frences Hodgson Burnet
  Recommended by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Joanna Quinn
  Publish Date: 1911
  Children’s book. Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle. She is spoilt and contrary, but also very lonely. Then one day she finds out about a secret garden located in the ground of Misselthwaite Manor,…
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  The Secret Garden
  by Frences Hodgson Burnet
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  The Great Silence
  By Juliet Nicolson
  Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
  Publish Date: 2010
  In this book, Juliet Nicolson explores a fascinating moment in history, the years between 1918 and 1920, a painful reckoning for those who had lived through the peaceful Edwardian times and found themselves faced with a new and challenging reality. …
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  The Great Silence
  by Juliet Nicolson
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  The Green Knowe Stories
  By Lucy M. Boston
  Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
  Publish Date: 1954 – 1976
  Green Knowe is a series of six children’s novels written by Lucy M. Boston and illustrated by her son Peter Boston, published from 1954 to 1976. Based on Boston’s home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, England,…
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  The Green Knowe Stories
  by Lucy M. Boston
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  A Life in Secrets
  By Sarah Helm
  Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
  Publish Date: 2005
  With unprecedented access to official and private documents, Sarah Helm reconstructs the life of Vera Atkins, an intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. After the war, she…
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  A Life in Secrets
  by Sarah Helm
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  Charlotte Gray
  By Sebastian Faulks
  Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
  Publish Date: 1998
  It’s 1942 and Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman, is embarking on a dangerous journey to Occupied France, officially to run an errand for British special operations, but unofficially to look for her missing lover, an English airman. When she…
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  Charlotte Gray
  by Sebastian Faulks
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  Among The Bohemians
  By Virginia Nicholson
  Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
  Publish Date: 2002
  In this insightful and fascinating book, Virginia Nicholson paints a portrait of the Bohemians in England, the artistic community that flourished in the early twentieth century, and their subversive social experiment.
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  Among The Bohemians
  by Virginia Nicholson
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