Book description
FROM THE GLOBALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
'Bittersweet ... dazzling' Guardian
'Deeply pleasurable ... the ending made me cry' The Times
'Told with a wealth of detail and narrative intensity' Penelope Lively
Violet is 38.
The First World War took everything…
Why read it?
1 author picked A Single Thread as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I love Chevaiier’s books. She has exceptional skill in recreating the past, from early medieval France to nineteenth-century America.
This novel explores the world of a small English cathedral city in the 1930s, through the life of Violet, a youngish woman rendered ‘surplus’ because her fiancé and so many other men of her generation had perished in the First World War. There are no fireworks in this story, but I found it moving in depicting the hopes, fears, prejudices, and struggles of its varied characters, with the shadows of another World War already looming on the horizon.
If you love A Single Thread...
Bessie
Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Bessie reimagines the early life of Bess Myerson, a Jewish woman and piano prodigy, who, in 1945 at age twenty-one, remarkably rises to become one of the most famous women in America.
This intimate fictional portrait reveals the transformation of the nearly six-foot-tall, self-deprecating…
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