A powerful and poetic novel from the multi-award-winning author of Tangleweed and Brine
Ces longs to be a tattoo artist and embroider skin with beautiful images. But for now she’s just trying to reach adulthood without falling apart.
Powerful, poetic and disturbing, Needlework is a girl’s meditation on her efforts to maintain her bodily and spiritual integrity in the face of abuse, violation and neglect.
‘Reading Needlework is similar to getting your first tattoo – it’s searing, often painful, but it is an experience you’ll never forget.’ – Louise O’Neill, author of The Surface Breaks and Asking For It
‘Needlework is a powerful novel that deserves to be read.’ – Sarah Crossan, author of One and We Come Apart
‘I loved Deirdre Sullivan’s Needlework, a novel that is just as sharp and precise as its title suggests.’ – Doireann Ní Ghríofa, poet
‘A modern, broken fairy tale that gets under your skin.’ – Tara Flynn, author and comedian
About the Author :
Deirdre Sullivan is from Galway and is now living in Dublin, where she works as a teacher.
Her hugely acclaimed Tangleweed and Brine, a collection of feminist retellings of classic fairytales, won the Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award in 2018 and Young Adult Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2017. Previously, her novel Needlework had won the Honour Award for Fiction at the Children’s Books Ireland Awards in 2017.
Sullivan's Primrose Leary series was also widely praised; two of the Prim books were shortlisted for the Children’s Books Ireland Awards; and the final one, Primperfect, was also shortlisted for the European Prize for Literature.
Review :
A word of advice: do not read this book after 2 am as you might start crying – although it’s definitely worth it.
The details of the skill, knowledge and painstaking preparation required are as alluring as the descriptions of delicate, powerful and enduring images, while the idea of blemishing the skin in order to create beauty is a metaphor for Ces’s path through life.
This is a powerful novel that haunts you long after you have read the final page.
My number one most adored for this year has to be Deirdre Sullivan’s Needlework.
So beautiful that you won’t want to put it down, even as your heart is breaking for Ces.
A brave, necessary book that burned into my heart.
Beautiful and poetic.
Material handled with all the delicacy of touch we would expect from the most talented of tattooists.
