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'A big, fat doorstep of a novel'

24 April 2023

‘My favourite reading experience, if I was going to choose one, would be a big, fat doorstep of a novel, so I always had in my mind that I would try to write the kind of book that I liked to read, the kind of multi-generational, big bed of a novel that you sink into...

When I do my research, I am always looking for the granular detail - the smell of the food, say - and I tried to inhabit it as much as I could...

I think with a big novel it's hard to get far enough away from it that you can see the whole, particularly if you are trying to juggle writing with jobs and family stuff. You tend to write in quite small chunks and you're just writing what is right in front of you.

The Whalebone Theatre is also about carrying on despite loss, continuing to put on a show and celebrating when you can. It's quite a poignant lesson, and a strange one, to think that fiction characters that you have made up entirely have something to teach you.'

British novelist Joanna Quinn, whose first novel The Whalebone Theatre was published last year, in the Bookseller