
The Whalebone Theatre
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Olivia Vinall
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By:
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Joanna Quinn
About this listen
“Absolute aces...Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold.” —The New York Times
“Utterly heartbreaking and joyous.” —Jo Baker, author of Longbourn
One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household—her sister, Flossie; her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid; Taras, visiting artist—build a theatre from the beast’s skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life.
As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France—a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.©2022 Joanna Quinn (P)2022 Random House Audio
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Critic reviews
A Best Book of the Year: New York Times Notable, Washington Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Vox, Book Riot, Geek Girl Authority • A Best Gift Book: Seattle Times, Broadway Direct • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK, in collaboration with the Queen Consort Camilla’s Royal Reading Room
“What’s remarkable, especially for a first novel, is Quinn’s deft way of depicting this lost world—whether a subsiding seaside aristocracy or a training school for British agents or a Parisian theater in wartime . . . Her vision is so fine and fully realized that it’s hard to imagine her doing anything else—and hard to have to wait to see what that might be.”—Washington Post
“An immersive, capacious delight . . . The pages fly by . . . The Whalebone Theatre is a supremely accomplished feat of storytelling. . . Quinn excels with the nuts and bolts of her craft—characterization, pace, plotting, and well-calibrated humor and suspense—and brilliantly depicts the rugged beauty of her county ‘on the crumbling bottom edge of England.'”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
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Story
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe.
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So glad I was drawn to this book.
- By timbo on 05-23-21
By: Maggie Shipstead
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The School for Good Mothers
- A Novel
- By: Jessamine Chan
- Narrated by: Catherine Ho
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.
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What in the world?
- By Love2Read on 01-11-22
By: Jessamine Chan
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City of Girls
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance.
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A strong story
- By Anita Kristensen on 06-08-19
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Maame
- A Novel
- By: Jessica George
- Narrated by: Heather Agyepong
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.
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A dang good book!
- By Christina on 02-10-23
By: Jessica George
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- By: Susanna Clarke
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 32 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.
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Hang in there!
- By D. McMillen on 05-31-05
By: Susanna Clarke
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Homecoming
- By: Kate Morton
- Narrated by: Claire Foy
- Length: 17 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959. At the end of a scorching hot day, a local deliveryman makes a terrible discovery. A police investigation is called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most shocking and perplexing murder cases in the history of South Australia. Many years later and thousands of miles away, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, she now finds herself laid off from her full-time job and struggling to make ends meet. Until a phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney.
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Loved the compelling audiobook version!
- By Melissas Bookshelf on 04-07-23
By: Kate Morton
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The Paper Palace
- A Novel
- By: Miranda Cowley Heller
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a 50-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at “The Paper Palace” - the family summer place she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: Last night, Elle and her oldest friend, Jonas, crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love.
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The story has too much child abuse discription
- By DTurek on 07-14-21
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As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
- By: Zoulfa Katouh
- Narrated by: Rasha Zamamiri
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life. Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion.
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Tell me something good
- By Michel on 02-11-24
By: Zoulfa Katouh
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Once There Were Wolves
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte McConaghy
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing fourteen gray wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska. Inti is not the woman she once was, either, changed by the harm she’s witnessed—inflicted by humans on both the wild and each other. Yet as the wolves surprise everyone by thriving, Inti begins to let her guard down, even opening herself up to the possibility of love.
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Takes a dive into dark
- By Linda Ottey on 08-10-21
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The Warm Hands of Ghosts
- A Novel
- By: Katherine Arden
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch, January LaVoy, Katherine Arden
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, Laura receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital, where she soon hears whispers about haunted trenches and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion.
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WW 1 and the Apocolypse
- By Sam Pakan on 02-27-24
By: Katherine Arden
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The Paris Express
- By: Emma Donoghue
- Narrated by: Justin Avoth
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia.
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Outstanding narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 03-19-25
By: Emma Donoghue
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Go as a River
- A Novel
- By: Shelley Read
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado—the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses. Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known.
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Great character development
- By ALB on 11-22-23
By: Shelley Read
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Table for Two
- Fictions
- By: Amor Towles
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, J. Smith-Cameron
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.
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I adore Amor Towles!!
- By Deb Mitchell on 04-20-24
By: Amor Towles
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We Must Not Think of Ourselves
- By: Lauren Grodstein
- Narrated by: Brad Griffith, Jesse Vilinsky, Sharon Freedman, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards to await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Would he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors.
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A beautiful book.
- By Donna Morgan on 12-04-23
By: Lauren Grodstein
What listeners say about The Whalebone Theatre
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- Ellen
- 10-23-22
Great story
I really enjoyed this novel . The characters are well developed and I feel like I really got to know them . Time we’ll spent !
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- Woomie Dew
- 12-24-22
Wonderful Writing
Good story, wonderful writing, very good performance. I recommend this book to any historical fiction lover!
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- Sandie Jacobs, MFT
- 12-30-22
Very original
This was an interesting read for a first time author. I loved the characters and was sad when the last chapter ended. And although I could feel what was about to happen to Digby in Paris, I wanted to run away from that event. The narrator was outstanding. I could have listened to her for another hour.
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- Joann Bristow
- 02-25-23
Not my normal
I purchased it based on reviews and description. Although it seemed to drag on at times. The narrator was good.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-09-22
Loved this book!
So glad that Jenna Bush Hager suggested it for her book club and so glad I read it!!!
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- Martha Casey
- 12-09-22
descriptive writing keeps interest going
Although somewhat long winded in beginning, the descriptions are so well orchestrated it keeps you interested. spanning several social era's, gives you another glimpse of the lead up to WWII, the war years and the aftermath.
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- Kristen J.
- 03-25-23
A gorgeous story masterfully written
I kept mistakenly thinking of it as a show rather than a book. I’d look forward to watching, ope, I mean listening to more. The writing is descriptive in a way I (a mere mortal) can only describe as awe-inspiring in how uniquely, beautifully clear it is. The performance is phenomenal (still wondering where she’s actually from because she nailed every accent). I don’t know if I’ve ever read something so well written—original, breathtaking, and just glorious.
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- Me
- 03-06-23
Such a beautiful tale!
Loved the story, the performance, the language, and the characters. Beautifully executed in all ways. Christabel is my hero!
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- mary
- 05-16-23
Heads and tails above most historical fiction.
If you like historical fiction, but feel like most of it just narrates banal tales and basic history, this is a book for you. Much more sophisticated than most I've read. Interesting characters, unusual narrative structure, compelling to the end.
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- Clayton Bigsby
- 06-21-23
A Classic in the making
This story was absolutely beautiful and has a timeless quality. Take The Great Gatsby, Downton Abbey and Peter Pan.. mixed into a World War 2 story you have The Whalebone Theater. This is going on my all time favorites list.
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