By bonnie blaylock
The Water Women
Historical Fiction – Lake Union Publishing
A powerful, emotional, and redemptive novel about the interwoven lives of mothers and daughters and the bonds of an ancient craft that link them through two world wars and beyond.
In 1930s Sardinia, Allegra and her daughters maintain the tradition of the water women. As it was for the generations of Jewish mothers and daughters before her, weaving the fine threads of mollusks into golden cloth and tapestry is an honor, a duty, and a precious gift to an outside world that seems bent on turmoil.
By 1942, a threat comes to their sleepy fishing village. Germany has pressed its boot on Italy.
Allegra’s daughter Zaneta notices boats she’s never seen before anchored off the shore. As her family withdraws from the once-unified community, their island home sinks into a fog of fear and suspicion. Then Zaneta meets a German deserter. With the encounter comes a secret that will haunt Zaneta forever, and in the years to come, her own daughter, Mira, as well.
For three women, the threads of the byssus weave a story of love, war, loss, and hope that will challenge them and bind them through the most trying times of their lives.
Reviews
“With The Water Women, set on a lush Mediterranean island off the coast of Italy, Bonnie Blaylock gives us the extraordinary gift of travel to another time and place, richly described. But also, in this beautifully unfamiliar setting, we find those familiar, ancient complications of generational ties. As the story unspools, we witness the threads of knowledge, struggle, forgiveness and love that bind, sometimes constrict and always enliven as they are passed down mother to daughter. With a lovely interweaving of little-known history and vivid imagination, here is a rich, engrossing tale of passion, purpose, and self-understanding.”
—Joy Jordan-Lake, bestselling author of Echoes of Us and A Tangled Mercy
“Bonnie Blaylock’s The Water Women is a tale of three generations of Sardinian women whose family’s history of tradition, secrecy, wisdom and love becomes an enchanting tapestry woven with the rare golden threads they harvest from the ocean floor.”
—Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky and All the Glimmering Stars
“For me, “The Water Women” is a story of survival, transformation, and the enduring connections between women and their world. It lingers long after the final page, inviting reflection and rereading, and confirms Bonnie Blaylock as a writer of both insight and empathy. If you, like me, love historical fiction that honours both the sweep of time and the quiet power of individual lives, this novel will stay with you — much like the tides it so beautifully evokes. historical novel.”
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—Mary Anne Yarde, Coffee Pot Book Club
“As someone who believes deeply in travel as a pathway to wellbeing, this book felt like a form of armchair travel. I felt transported to a quieter, lesser-known corner of Italy in a way that invited me to linger, notice, and listen. I closed this novel feeling quietly awed. Exactly the kind of journey I love most.”
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