The Resistance Knitting Club

Threads of Resistance

Inspired by the true story of a woman who used knitting patterns to encode intelligence during World War Two.

Guernsey, 2010. After a stroke, an elderly woman shocks her family by speaking perfect French—a language they never knew she possessed. As her granddaughter unravels seventy years of silence, a hidden wartime story emerges...

Paris, 1941. After her brother is declared missing in action at Dunkirk, eighteen-year-old Lenny Gallienne vanishes into Churchill’s secret army. In a bookshop on Rue de la Pompe, she poses as a simple shop girl while encoding intelligence from Nazi headquarters into knitting patterns. Each sweater smuggled to prisoners contains flight paths. Each scarf holds radio frequencies. Each mistake means execution.

Fellow agent, Harry Dennison, is the only person who knows her real name. But when the Gestapo close in, Lenny faces an impossible choice in the Metro tunnels beneath Paris—one that will haunt her family for generations. Because in the resistance, the most dangerous secrets are the ones you keep from those you love most.

Perfect for fans of The Nightingale, The Alice Network and The Last Bookshop in London.

©2026 Jenny O'Brien (P)2026 Storm Publishing

Knitting offers comfort and clever communication

Charming story offering a glimpse into the lives of common people in WW2 who found clever ways to resist the Nazis.

Had hoped for more….

The story was okay. As other reviewers have noted, there’s not a ton of knitting in the story which I would’ve liked. My main issue is that I believe the narrator was miscast. Although I ordinarily love an Irish lilt, it really didn’t fit here. I found her tone often quite monotonous and repetitive. She mostly did a good job with the accents but sometimes it was jarringly bad - like pronouncing the German names. I often couldn’t tell who was speaking because the various voices sounded so similar. Maybe just read this one and skip the audio version.

Story not very compelling, narration monotone

I found the story to be not very compelling with nothing to draw me in or keep me listening to find out what was going to happen. The narrator was drab and unexciting with very little inflection or change. There was no difference between the characters of the male or female voices making it confusing at times as to who was talking. A more animated narration might have helped but I finally gave up on the book.