I’m so excited to be welcoming Jenny O’Brien back to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for her new book, The Secret Dressmaker.

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.

Northern Ireland, 1942. Flora Toussaint packs parachutes for the RAF, haunted by the twin daughters she was forced to give up eighteen years ago. When British intelligence shows her photographs of her girls – now young women in occupied Paris – her world shifts. One is safe. One has vanished. And their father, the celebrated couturier Lucien Lumineau, is suspected of collaborating with the Nazis.

Flora agrees to a dangerous mission: parachute into France, pose as a seamstress at the Moulin Rouge, and uncover the truth. Lodging above a brothel where Edith Piaf sings after hours and where Pablo Picasso still holds court, she mends costumes between shows, searches for any trace of her missing daughter between curfews, and circles closer to Lucien.

But Lucien isn’t the man she remembers. Neither is their history. And what Flora discovers will unravel everything she thought she knew – about Lucien, about her daughters, and about the night she gave them away.

A sweeping tale of wartime Paris, family secrets and impossible choices. Fans of Kate Quinn, Pam Jenoff and Kristin Hannah will be mesmerised by The Secret Dressmaker.

*****

Flora Toussaint is haunted by the choices of a past where she was persuaded to give up her twin daughters eighteen years before. When a secret mission gives her the opportunity to go back to Paris, her focus is on finding her girls, even when her simple presence in the city puts her in danger.

Having loved the first book in this series, The Resistance Knitting Club, I couldn’t wait to get going on this one. I am a big fan of novels based on true events, and I’m always intrigued to see how the author builds the fiction around the fact. In my opinion, Jenny O’ Brien is a master at it.

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