Few of us need reminding that childhood can be a difficult and challenging time; but it can also be a magical one. That duality is at the heart of The Whalebone Theater, the best-selling debut novel of Joana Quinn. Childhood is central, also, to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 classic novel, The Secret Garden, in which a group of three young children discover the transformative magic of nature during the course of three seasons in a remote house in the Yorkshire moors. It is one of two books that Quinn has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is Michael Ondaatje’s prize-winning novel, The English Patient, a deeply poetic story of love and betrayal, identity and class that takes place in an abandoned Italian villa in the waning days of the Second World War.
Few of us need reminding that childhood can be a difficult and challenging time; but it can also be a magical one. That duality is at the heart of The Whalebone Theater, the best-selling debut novel of Joana Quinn. Childhood is central, also, to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 classic novel, The Secret Garden, in which a group of three young children discover the transformative magic of nature during the course of three seasons in a remote house in the Yorkshire moors. It is one of two books that Quinn has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is Michael Ondaatje’s prize-winning novel, The English Patient, a deeply poetic story of love and betrayal, identity and class that takes place in an abandoned Italian villa in the waning days of the Second World War.