The shadow of war – one past but still deeply felt, one chillingly inevitable – hangs over Chevalier’s mesmerising new novel. A moving and thoughtful examination of womanhood in turbulent 1930s England, A Single Thread resounds with understated power and delicate beauty.
It is 1932, and the losses of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiance and her brother and regarded by society as a `surplus woman' unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone.
A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity. Violet falls in with the broderers, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives and their secrets. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon Violet collects a few secrets of her own that could just change everything...
Warm, vivid and beautifully orchestrated, A Single Thread reveals one of our finest modern writers at the peak of her powers.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780008153816
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 530 g
Dimensions: 227 x 159 x 33 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'An intricate portrait of the hopes and struggles of 'surplus women' left alone after the first world war.' - The Guardian
'I loved it. So compelling and warm and subtle, and very moving' - Bridget Collins, author of The Binding
'I enjoyed A Single Thread enormously. Tracy Chevalier wonderfully evokes the social climate of the nineteen thirties - this is the intriguing story of a young woman facing the conventions and prejudices of the day, told with a wealth of detail and narrative intensity' - Penelope Lively
'A deceptively quiet, deeply touching novel. Like a 20th-century Jane Austen, Chevalier draws you in with a careful, beautiful, thread, leading to new and different kinds of happiness for women to whom historical circumstance and parochial mores have not been kind' - Louisa Young, author of You Left Early and My Dear I Wanted to Tell You
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