Threads of Resistance

Guernsey, 2010. After a stroke, an elderly woman shocks her family by speaking perfect French—a language they never knew she possessed. As her granddaughter unravels seventy years of silence, a hidden wartime story emerges... Paris, 1941. After her brother is declared missing in action at Dunkirk, eighteen-year-old Lenny Gallienne vanishes into Churchill’s secret army. In a bookshop on Rue de la Pompe, she poses as a shop girl while encoding intelligence from Nazi headquarters into knitting patterns. Each sweater smuggled to prisoners contains flight paths. Each scarf holds radio frequencies.

Shelves of sequins in a kaleidoscope of colours. Bolts of silk and tulle against the back wall. The sewing room was the last place anyone had seen her daughter alive. Manchester, 1942. Flora Toussaint packs parachutes for the RAF, haunted by the twin daughters she was forced to give up eighteen...

Inspired by a real Victorian crochet book – and the secret language of women who crafted their way through a war. Paris, 1943. Marguerette Touissant has lost almost everything. Illness has stolen the voice that made her a star at the Moulin Rouge; the war has taken her father, the celebrated...