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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.