Please join me in welcomin Jenny O’Brien to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for her book, The Resistance Knitting Club.

Inspired by the true story of a woman who used knitting patterns to encode intelligence during World War Two.  

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 simple shop girl while encoding intelligence from Nazi headquarters into knitting patterns. Each sweater smuggled to prisoners contains flight paths. Each scarf holds radio frequencies. Each mistake means execution.

Fellow agent, Harry Dennison is the only person who knows her real name. But when the SS close in, Lenny faces an impossible choice in the Metro tunnels beneath Paris – one that will haunt her family for generations. Because in the resistance, the most dangerous secrets are the ones you keep from those you love most.

*****

It’s 2010. An elderly lady sits in a hospital bed and, out of nowhere, begins to speak French. This is a complete surprise to her family. It’s 1941, Lenny is grieving the loss of someone close to her. She decides to join the war effort by working at the war office. When this takes an unexpected turn, this will change the course of Lenny’s life forever.

I couldn’t be happier to be invited onto the blog tour for The Resistance Knitting Club. When I read the blurb for this book, there was something about this story that drew me to it.

Continue reading →

by