Whalebone Theatre

Cristabel Seagrave grows up at Chilcombe, a fading estate on the Dorset coast, mostly overlooked by her own family. Her mother died young, and her father wanted a son instead. Once he remarries, the household barely notices she is there, and she finds better company among the servants. Later she gains real allies too: her half-sister Flossie and her cousin Digby.

At twelve, she claims a whale that washes up on the shore below the house before anyone else can. Inside its rib cage, the skeleton becomes a stage. Cristabel casts Flossie, Digby and whoever else she can recruit in home-grown productions of Homer and Shakespeare. It becomes the one place where she gets to be in charge.

Their games carry the three of them through the interwar years, and when war reaches England, the skills turn out to be more than play. Cristabel and Digby are recruited into espionage work and parachuted separately into occupied France to help the Resistance, while Flossie stays home to join the Women's Land Army. She heads toward Paris herself as the city's liberation nears.

This is Joanna Quinn's first novel, and it spans nearly three decades of one restless family's history. It moves from a country house childhood to wartime France without losing sight of Cristabel, the daughter nobody quite knew what to do with.