The
Great Christmas Knit OffBy:
Alexandra Brown
Releasing
October 13, 2015
Harper
Collins
Blurb
The
perfect seasonal tale of how laughter, friends and wacky Christmas
sweaters can mend a broken heart.
Heartbroken
after being jilted at the altar, Sybil has been saved from despair by
her knitting obsession and now her home is filled to bursting with
tea cozies, beanies, and sweaters. But, after discovering that she
may have perpetrated the screw-up of the century at work, Sybil
decides to make a hasty exit and, just weeks before Christmas, runs
away to the picturesque village of Tindledale.
There,
Sybil discovers Hettie’s House of Haberdashery, an emporium
dedicated to the world of knitting and needle craft. But Hettie, the
outspoken octogenarian owner, is struggling and now the shop is due
for closure. And when Hettie decides that Sybil’s wonderfully wacky
Christmas sweaters are just the thing to add a bit of excitement to
her window display, something miraculous starts to happen…
Excerpt
PROLOGUE
Hettie Honey picked up a lovely
lavender lace weight that a customer had abandoned by the till after
pondering for what seemed like an eternity that, actually, it wasn’t
the right shade of lavender after all. She then walked across the
shop floor of her House of Haberdashery to repatriate the ball into
its rightful place—a wooden, floor-to-ceiling cabinet comprising
twenty-four cubbyholes inset over three shelves crammed with every
color, ply and type of yarn imaginable. Hettie smiled wryly,
remembering the program she had listened to on the radio not so long
ago. Knitting! It was all the rage nowadays and she hoped it would
finally catch on in Tindledale, her beloved picture-postcard village
and Hettie’s home for the eighty-three years of her life to date.
She ran the timber-framed, double-fronted shop adjacent to the
wisteria-clad roundel of the oast house her father had built before
she was even born.
Hettie
lifted the tray on which sat the last remnants of her afternoon tea;
a cheese sandwich minus the crusts because her teeth weren’t as
strong as they used to be plus a pot of tea and a pink iced finger
that had only cost ten pence on account of being past its best.
Kitty, in the tearoom up on the High Street, had tried to give her
the bun for free, but Hettie hated taking charity, especially when
she felt there were other people in far more need. Hettie moved to
the back of the shop, swept the curtain aside and went through to the
little kitchenette area. Years ago this had been her mother’s
sewing room, and the wooden Singer machine with its rickety foot
pedal still lived there, with a multitude of multicolored bobbins all
piled up high on the shelf behind it.
After placing the tray on the
draining board next to the age-veined Belfast sink and carefully
wrapping the crusts in plastic to dunk into her warming homemade soup
the following afternoon, Hettie picked up the picture frame on the
mantelpiece above the fi re and ran a finger over the faded
black-and-white autographed photo. She allowed herself an enormous
sigh. She wasn’t usually one for self-pity or hand-wringing, but
another one of the letters had come this morning, with FINAL DEMAND
stamped across the top in ugly red type. Business had been so slow
these past couple of years, and now, with her dwindling savings and
pittance of a pension, she had come to realize that it was going to
take a darn miracle this Christmas for Hettie’s House of
Haberdashery to remain afloat come the new year.
There had been talk of retirement;
of closing down the House of Haberdashery; of putting her feet up and
going “into a home.” Hettie’s nephew, her brother Harold’s
son and last of the Honey family line, was all for it. On one of his
rare visits, on the pretext of seeing how she was, he’d told Hettie
he was concerned about her living on her own, that she needed the
rest and that “it’s not like you’ve got that
many customers these
days, is it?” He said he’d make sure she had her own bedroom or
at the very least, a twin sharer. “And besides, it might be nice
for her to have the company of people her own age.” He’d put
forward a strong case and had already contacted the council to
inquire about a suitable place. But Hettie wasn’t losing her
marbles and she knew that what he was really after was to bulldoze
her beloved home—the oast house surrounded by a meadow of pretty
wild flowers, and the place where she grew up. There’s her cozy
bedroom suite, set upstairs in the roundel with its magnificent view
of the valley, the lovely farmhouse kitchen with the walk-in pantry,
the sunroom, the snug—it’s got the lot, and that’s on top of
all her memories wrapped within its circular walls. Not to mention
her beloved little shop, right next door, crammed full of all her
favorite knitting and needlecraft goodies.
Then he’d be able to get his hands
on the land for one of his building projects. He’d told her all
about the one with ample parking and plastic windows that his company
had created in the town where he lived, over fifty miles away.
Seventeen months it had taken, he’d said, to fight all the
objections from the local residents’ association, and he had puffed
on about it for the entire hour of that tedious visit. But Hettie
isn’t ready to be written off; to be carted away to an old people’s
home like a nag to a glue factory, not when there is plenty of life
still left in her sprightly body. Besides, “going into a home”
would mean leaving Tindledale behind, and Hettie knows more than
anything that this is where her heart belongs. It always has, even
when she’d had the chance of a different life, far, far away.
Goodreads
Link:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22887991-the-great-christmas-knit-off?from_search=true&search_version=service
Author
Info
Alexandra
Brown began her writing career as the City Girl columnist for The
London Paper - a satirical diary account of her time working in the
corporate world of London. Alex wrote the weekly column for two years
before giving it up to concentrate on writing novels and is now the
author of the Carrington’s books. Set in a department store in the
pretty seaside town of Mulberry-On-Sea, the series follows the life,
loves and laughs of sales assistant, Georgie Hart. The Great
Christmas Knit Off is Alex’s fourth book and is the first in a new
series set in the fictional village of Tindledale, following the
lives of all the characters there.
Alex
lives in a real village near the south coast of England, with her
husband, daughter and a very shiny black Labrador.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/alexbrownbooks
Instagram:
https://instagram.com/alexbrownbooks/
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