Joanna Quinn

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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.

Author recommends

    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,…
  • 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. …
  • 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,…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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.