Author: Jenny O’Brien
The Secret Dressmaker is the second book in the Threads of Resistance book series by Jenny O’Brien. This book was published in August 2026, and I had it on preorder because I really liked book 1, The Resistance Knitting Club.
In this book, which is not a continuation of the previous story, it simply follows the same women’s war resistance through sewing and fashion; we meet Flora Toussaint. Flora is a parachute packer for the RAF, who is then recruited for a mission in occupied France. RAF knows that Flora left France 18 years earlier after she was forced to give up her twin daughters. Now that she has learned her daughters are in Paris, and one is missing, while their father, haute couture designer Lucien Lumineau, is suspected of being a Nazi collaborator, she parachutes into France and takes work as a seamstress in Moulin Rouge while working to help British intelligence find out whether Lucien is indeed a collaborator and while searching for her daughter.
The Secret Dressmaker explores motherhood and separation; women’s wartime work; resistance and collaboration; secrecy and deception; class and gender; fashion and dressmaking; craft as communication; family memory; moral ambiguity; and survival under occupation. What I liked is that dressmaking, clothing, and textile work are not decorative backgrounds but forms of access, concealment, identity, and resistance. Patchwork quilting and coding are part of the resistance story, so an ordinary feminine practice also becomes a communication system.
This is probably what I found most interesting about the book. Like The Resistance Knitting Club, it takes an activity historically associated with women and the domestic or decorative sphere and shows that it can also carry information, provide cover, create networks and enable political resistance. Communication in the novel, therefore, does not always happen through formal messages or official channels. Sometimes it is hidden in objects, practices and routines that appear completely ordinary to those who do not know how to read them. The fact that these things did happen during WWII (the UK National Archives has images showing Morse code in garments) is even more fascinating, and novels tackling women’s resistance were much needed.
Thank you for reading!