The Dressmaker

After years away, Tilly Dunnage returns to the tiny, spiteful Australian town of Dungatar in the 1950s, bringing with her a sewing machine, a wardrobe of Paris couture, and a reputation as the girl blamed for a childhood death she can barely remember. She has come back to care for her half-mad mother, Molly — and, though she won't admit it, to finally learn the truth about what happened to her and why she was cast out.

As Tilly transforms the town's dowdy women into glamorous creatures with her needle, old cruelties and secrets begin to surface, and her presence sets in motion a reckoning the town will not survive intact. Rosalie Ham's darkly comic debut is a gothic revenge tale dressed in haute couture — sharp, macabre, and unexpectedly moving.