Threaded Hearts

In Sedgewick Bay, a fishing village on the False Bay coast of South Africa, ten-year-old Riley Hart grows up in a household held together by two trades: her father Daniel's fishing boat, the Grace Note, and her mother Grace's Singer sewing machine. When Grace falls ill and leaves an unfinished blue dress as her last lesson to her daughter, Riley begins to understand that what the needle knows cannot be taught in words. After losing both parents before she is thirteen, Riley is passed between a distant aunt and a church home before Nomsa Dlamini, the village fishmonger, fights through the courts to bring her back to the harbour. Returning to Sedgewick Bay, Riley reclaims her mother's machine and rebuilds her life through craft, community, and the harbour wall where her father taught her to read the sea. At fifteen, Riley completes her mother's unfinished dress and wears it to fight a development corporation threatening the harbour. At nineteen, she opens Hart Atelier in a converted harbour shed, its north windows giving the right light for fine work. At twenty, she discovers that a dress her mother made thirty years ago has been living in the wardrobe of a fisherman's family, holding them in ways Grace never knew. Spanning twenty years of one woman's life, Threaded Hearts is a novel about the knowledge that lives in hands rather than minds, the communities that survive by tending to one another, and the truth that the broken place, folded in and sewn strong, becomes the strongest part of any seam.