Tom Vey's Gansey

About this book

Halifax, 1941. The harbour is crowded with convoys, the windows are blacked out, and Nell Vey is dying. Blind since the great explosion of 1917, Nell is the last of the old harbour knitters, women whose needles can let the living wear the dead. Twenty-four years ago, in a basement morgue, her daughter Ada put on her dead brother Tom's gansey and walked out wearing his face. Ada has lived as Tom ever since: husband to Tom's sweetheart Ruth, father to Tom's son, a rigger at the Dockyard, forgetting a little more of herself each year. Only Nell's hands can unknit her. Told by four women of one family across three hard winters, this is a story of survival, of secrets kept for love, and of a choice that has to be made before the knitter's hands go still: to come back, or to stay gone.