Threads

When Yana Petrenko follows her lover, Leonid Kostenko, to Canada in 1893 as the wife of another man, her life changes forever, little realising her action causes consequences for two other women, living in different eras, Eleanora-Rose in 1904 and Anna Jamieson in 2018.

In 1887 when young Yana Petrenko meets Leonid Kostenko, she little realises he will change her life forever.

When Leonid reaches manhood, he emigrates to Canada. As a farewell gift, Yana sleeps with him and becomes pregnant. In her desire for Leonid she decides to follow him. To do this she marries Yegor Liskle, a man she doesn’t know, but who is on the verge of emigrating. While on the ship Yana creates Sofina.
In Canada she gives birth to twins, Nicholas and Zoya, but five years later when her husband and Nicholas die in a tragic fire she leaves their homestead to begin anew.

In 1904 Zoya ‘loses’ her beloved Sofina doll at Highbury House where Eleanora-Rose (fourteen and a doll collector) and Merritt (eleven) live.
Both sisters are socially inept, yet through good fortune Eleanora-Rose meets Albert Rutt. Three weeks before they are to be married (1909) Albert dies in what Eleanora-Rose thinks are strange circumstances.

Both sisters never marry. When Merritt dies Eleanora-Rose finds Sofina hidden away. But she never uncovers the small bottle which once contained rat poison, giving her the answer to Albert’s death.

Upon Eleanora-Rose’s death (1980) her collection of dolls ends up in an Antique Dealers in New Zealand, where Sofina is purchased by Maxwell Stevens for his wife, Anna Jamieson (doll restorer).

While Anna and Max’s are on their honeymoon in Switzerland (2018) Max meets an untimely death while skiing, after which Anna retreats to his cottage in England, where she discovers Sofina packed at the bottom of the trunk. Gradually she settles into village life and enjoys the locals, especially Timothy Thistlewaite, a bachelor and popular writer.

In her restoration of the doll, she never understands why a tiny bottle is tucked deep within her body.