The Dressmakers War

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

For readers of Amy Bloom, Sarah Waters, and Anthony Doerr, The Dressmaker’s War is the story of a brilliant English seamstress taken prisoner in Germany during World War II: about her perseverance, the choices she makes to stay alive, and the haunting aftermath of war. London, 1939. Ada Vaughan is a young working-class woman with an unusual skill for dressmaking who dreams of opening her own atelier. When she meets Stanislaus von Lieben, a Hungarian aristocrat, a new, better life seems to arrive. Stanislaus sweeps Ada off her feet and brings her to Paris. But when war breaks out and Stanislaus vanishes, Ada is abandoned and alone, trapped on an increasingly dangerous continent. Taken prisoner by the Germans, Ada does everything she can to survive. In the bleak horror of wartime Germany, Ada’s skill for creating beauty and glamour is the one thing that keeps her safe. But after the war, attempting to rebuild her life in London, Ada finds that no one is interested in the messy truths of what happened to women like her. And though Ada thought she had left the war behind, her past eventually comes to light, with devastating consequences. Gorgeously written and compulsively readable, The Dressmaker’s War introduces us to an unforgettable heroine—Ada Vaughan, a woman whose ambition for a better life ultimately comes at a heartbreaking cost. Praise for The Dressmaker’s War “Mary Chamberlain’s clear, bright prose is river-swift and Ada Vaughan is a character rich with beautiful, flawed humanity. This is a gripping story about limits and the haunting, brutal way they can be drawn and redrawn in war.”—Priya Parmar, author of Vanessa and Her Sister “A thrilling story, brilliantly told—I couldn’t put it down. Ada Vaughan is a character to fall in love with: utterly real, flawed, and beguiling.”—Saskia Sarginson, author of The Twins and Without You “I found myself completely swept up in this tale of love, ambition, and vanity.”—Juliet West, author of Before the Fall “The Dressmaker’s War is a powerful and gripping tale of longings and dreams, and how a chance meeting that seems to offer the answers and more instead comes with devastating consequences. It’s a story about what a person will do and can do under force.”—Cecilia Ekbäck, author of Wolf Winter

Gorgeously written and compulsively readable, The Dressmaker's War will appeal to readers of Amy Bloom, Sarah Waters, and Anthony Doerr.This is the story of Ada Vaughan, a brilliant English seamstress imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II: about her perseverance, the choices she makes to stay alive, and the haunting aftermath of war. An unforgettable heroine, Ada is a young working-class woman whose ambition for a better life ultimately comes at a heartbreaking cost.

A powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps. At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—mainly Jewish women and girls—were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop—called the Upper Tailoring Studio—was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin’s upper crust. Drawing on diverse sources—including interviews with the last surviving seamstress—The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers’ remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.

Tess, an aspiring seamstress, thinks she’s had an incredibly lucky break when she is hired by famous designer Lady Lucile Duff Gordon to be her personal maid on the Titanic. Once on board, Tess catches the eye of two men—a kind sailor and an enigmatic Chicago businessman—who offer differing views of what lies ahead for her in America. But on the fourth night, disaster strikes, and amidst the chaos, Tess is one of the last people allowed on a lifeboat. The survivors are rescued and taken to New York, but when rumors begin to circulate about the choices they made, Tess is forced to confront a serious question. Did Lady Duff Gordon save herself at the expense of others? Torn between loyalty to Lucile and her growing suspicion that the media’s charges might be true, Tess must decide whether to stay quiet and keep her fiery mentor’s good will or face what might be true and forever change her future.

Based on true accounts of how Parisiennes resisted the Nazi occupation in World War II—from fashion houses to the city streets—comes a story of two courageous women who risked everything to fight an evil they could not abide. Paris, 1939. Maison Chanel has closed, thrusting haute couture dressmaker Lila de Laurent out of the world of high fashion as Nazi soldiers invade the streets and the City of Light slips into darkness. Lila’s life is now a series of rations, brutal restrictions, and carefully controlled propaganda while Paris is cut off from the rest of the world. Yet in hidden corners of the city, the faithful pledge to resist. Lila is drawn to La Resistance and is soon using her skills as a dressmaker to infiltrate the Nazi elite. She takes their measurements and designs masterpieces, all while collecting secrets in the glamorous Hotel Ritz—the heart of the Nazis’ Parisian headquarters.?But when dashing René Touliard suddenly reenters her world, Lila finds her heart tangled between determination to help save his Jewish family and to bolster the fight for liberation. Paris, 1943. Sandrine Paquet’s job is to catalog the priceless works of art bound for the Führer’s Berlin, masterpieces stolen from prominent Jewish families. But behind closed doors, she secretly forages for information from the underground resistance. Beneath her compliant facade lies a woman bent on uncovering the fate of her missing husband . . . but at what cost? As Hitler’s regime crumbles, Sandrine is drawn in deeper when she uncrates an exquisite blush Chanel gown concealing a cryptic message that may reveal the fate of a dressmaker who vanished from within the fashion elite. Told across the span of the Nazi occupation, The Paris Dressmaker highlights the brave women who used everything in their power to resist darkness and restore light to their world. Stand-alone World War II historical fiction Includes discussion questions for book clubs

The New York Times bestseller, written by a former reporter for ABC News, that People magazine called “a transporting, enlightening book” tells the story of a fearless young entrepreneur who brought hope to the lives of dozens of women in war-torn Afghanistan Former ABC journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells the riveting true story of Kamila Sidiqi and other women of Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s fearful rise to power. In what Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, calls “one of the most inspiring books I have ever read,” Lemmon recounts with novelistic vividness the true story of a fearless young woman who not only reinvented herself as an entrepreneur to save her family but, in the face of ferocious opposition, brought hope to the lives of dozens of women in war-torn Kabul.

Beautiful and spirited Daniela dreams of becoming a doctor while growing up in Yedinitz, Romania in 1940, but as a Jew, she is barred from higher education. Her mother, who is the dressmaker to a local countess, hires her a tutor, the rebellious and precocious Mihail. The two soon begin a passionate romance, unable to resist the powerful love and attraction they share. When the Nazis invade Romania, Daniela and Mihail’s lives are forever changed: Mihail escapes and joins the partisans; Daniela is captured and sent on the notorious Transnistrian Death March, where Jews are starved, murdered, and robbed. Daniela is brutally raped by Romanian soldiers, and trapped by their depravity, she watches helplessly as her people are destroyed. Daniela’s life is spared when her beauty catches the eye of a Romanian Iron Guard commander, Major Dragulescu, who forcibly takes her as his concubine and also sends her to nurse Romanian soldiers in the field hospital, where Daniela cannot help feeling pity at the suffering that surrounds her. One night Mihail appears with a troop of partisans on a mission to assassinate two key Nazis visiting the major. What happens next is both heroic and tragic, and results in Daniela’s escape with the partisans, who train her in sabotage and battle tactics. She throws herself into living on the run behind enemy lines, and transforms herself into an effective soldier and partisan leader until the war mercifully comes to an end. The Dressmaker’s Daughter is an unflinching look at the horrors inflicted by the Nazis upon the Romanian Jews during the Holocaust, and one brave young woman’s ability to rise above her suffering and escape to freedom.

Imagine ‘stepping into someone else’s shoes’. Walking back in time a century ago, which shoes would they be? A pair of silk sensations costing thousands of pounds designed by Yantonnay of Paris or wooden clogs with metal cleats that spark on the cobbles of a factory yard? Will your shoes be heavy with mud from trudging along duckboards between the tents of a frontline hospital... or stuck with tufts of turf from a football pitch? Will you be cloaked in green and purple, brandishing a ‘Votes for Women’ banner or will you be the height of respectability, restricted by your thigh-length corset?Great War Fashion opens the woman’s wardrobe in the years before the outbreak of war to explore the real woman behind the stiff, mono-bosomed ideal of the Edwardian Society lady draped in gossamer gowns, and closes it on a new breed of women who have donned trousers and overalls to feed the nation’s guns in munitions factories and who, clad in mourning, have loved and lost a whole generation of men.The journey through Great War Fashion is not just about the changing clothes and fashions of the war years, but much more than that – it is a journey into the lives of the women who lived under the shadow of war and were irrevocably changed by it. At times, laugh-out-loud funny and at others, bringing you to tears, Lucy Adlington paints a unique portrait of an inspiring generation of women, brought to life in rare and stunning images.

Prepare to be swept away by this enthralling story of love, war and one woman who survived them both...