Book cover of A Single Thread

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 from her. Her brother, her…

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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. 

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Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.

By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse…

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