The Knitting Circle
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3.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Come on in and join the knitting circle – it might just save your life…
Spinning yarns, weaving tales, mending lives…
Every Wednesday a group of women gathers at Alice's Sit and Knit. Little do they know that they will learn so much more than patterns…
Grieving Mary needs to fill the empty days after the death of her only child.
Glamorous Scarlet is the life and soul of any party. But beneath her trademark red hair and beaming smile lurks heartache.
Sculptor Lulu seems too cool to live in the suburbs. Why has she fled New York's bright lights?
Model housewife Beth never has a hair out of place. But her perfect world is about to fall apart….
Irish-born Ellen wears the weight of the world on her shoulders but not her heart on her sleeve. What is she hiding?
As the weeks go by, under mysterious Alice's watchful eye, an unlikely friendship forms. Secrets are revealed and pacts made. Then tragedy strikes, and each woman must learn to face her own past in order to move on…
This heartbreaking and uplifting novel is the perfect book club read, for fans of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and The Keeper of Lost Things
Praise for Ann Hood
‘A heartbreaker’ Vanity Fair
‘An engrossing storyteller … [This book] works its magic.’ Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees
‘What a gift for Ann Hood, who suffered a loss nearly identical to Mary Baxter's, to have made of her grief.’ Newsday
‘Memorably stirring and authentic.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review
‘Ann Hood writes with the ease of a born storyteller.’ Chicago Tribune
‘Just like a woolly jumper, this book is cosy and perfect for long winter nights! … truly heartwarming.’ Closer
Reviews
Praise for The Knitting Circle
‘Just like a woolly jumper, this book is cosy and perfect for long winter nights! … truly heartwarming.’
Closer Magazine
Praise for Ann Hood:
‘A heartbreaker’
Vanity Fair
‘An engrossing storyteller … [This book] works its magic.’ Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees
‘What a gift for Ann Hood, who suffered a loss nearly identical to Mary Baxter's, to have made of her grief.’
Newsday
‘Memorably stirring and authentic.’
Los Angeles Times Book Review
‘Ann Hood writes with the ease of a born storyteller.’
Chicago Tribune
About the author
Ann Hood was born in Rhode Island. She graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a degree in American Literature and worked as a flight attendant for TWA for 8 years. Whilst working as a flight attendant, Ann got a Master's degree from New York University, also in American Literature. She lived in NYC until 1993 when she re-met and married someone she knew in high school.
Ann then moved back to Rhode Island and had a son, Sam. Her daughter Grace died in 2002 when she was 5; as a result, she adopted a baby from China, Annabelle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While mourning the death of her daughter, Hood (An Ornithologist's Guide to Life) learned to knit. In her comeback novel, Mary Baxter, living in Hood's own Providence, R.I., loses her five-year-old daughter to meningitis. Mary and her husband, Dylan, struggle to preserve their marriage, but the memories are too painful, and the healing too difficult. Mary can't focus on her job as a writer for a local newspaper, and she bitterly resents her emotionally and geographically distant mother, who relocated to Mexico years earlier. Still, it's at her mother's urging that Mary joins a knitting circle and discovers that knitting soothes without distracting. The structure of the story quickly becomes obvious: each knitter has a tragedy that she'll reveal to Mary, and if there's pleasure to be had in reading a novel about grief, it's in guessing what each woman's misfortune is and in what order it will be exposed. The strength of the writing is in the painfully realistic portrayal of the stages of mourning, and though there's a lot of knitting, both actual and metaphorical, the terminology's simple enough for nonknitters to follow and doesn't distract from the quick pace of the narrative.
