Joanna Quinn

Joanna Quinn was born in London, spent her childhood on the Dorset coast and made it the setting of her debut. The Whalebone Theatre begins on New Year's Eve 1919 with three-year-old Cristabel waiting at a Dorset manor for her father and new stepmother. A whale strands there in 1928, and twelve-year-old Cristabel claims its bones for a theatre; by the later sections she and her brother Digby are British agents on separate missions in German-occupied France. After working in journalism and communications and publishing short fiction through The White Review and Comma Press, Quinn completed the book as part of a doctorate in creative writing at Goldsmiths and now teaches the subject. Fig Tree brought it out in Britain in June 2022 and Knopf in America that October, and it was an instant bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Read With Jenna and Queen Camilla's Reading Room both selected it, and it was shortlisted for Best Debut Fiction at the British Book Awards as well as the Authors' Club Best First Novel award.