A Single Thread

In this brilliant, bitter-sweet novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring author Chevalier portrays the toil and lives of the women who sacrificed their leisure time to stitch the complex cushions and kneelers for Winchester Cathedral in the 1930s. While the novel is based on real life events (the embroidered pieces were adorned with Mary Tudor and Richard the Lionheart and had their own benediction service), it uses fictional Violet Speedwell, 38, to explore the lives of the “surplus women” left behind after World War I. Violet, who lost her

fiancé and brother in the war, has just moved out of the suffocating house she shared with her miserable mother. She works as a typist in a stuffy office, but her pay doesn’t stretch to a hot meal after she’s paid for heating and hot water in the house where lodgers hang stockings to dry. On a night out she waits for young men to top up her glass. But when she stumbles upon the “broderers” club, friendships and new skills flourish. Only Chevalier could make antimacassars (coverings on the backs and arms of chairs) and rice stitch sound sexy.