The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn

I found this on the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books, and liked the thumbnail sketch of the plot and thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is written like a play, in five acts, and tells the story on a landed gentry family on the Dorset coast. It spans the time from WWI to WWII, with what are probably not unusual circumstances when inheritance is at the forefront of priorities in most families under the circumstances. The setting is the manor house known as Chilcombe and three related children grow up there in the early 20th century, at a time when the king owned many things, including dead whales that wash ashore. They are somewhat benignly neglected and they each find their own ways with what they have. At one point they build a theater with the remains of said whale, and it becomes a part of who each of them becomes. The three all become involved in the war, and their bucolic location is more vulnerable as well. The WWII chapter of the book is by far the longest, just as the war was quite long for England, and there is a quite different ending for each of them. The very best part is that there is a subtext in this book that is telling a story just as loudly as the one the text reveals, and it is deftly done.