The Oysterville Sewing Circle
Caroline Shelby is a rising fashion designer in Manhattan when a public scandal forces her out of the industry overnight. She drives back across the country to her family's oyster farm in the rain-soaked Washington town of Oysterville, this time bringing two small children she has just been left to raise, the orphaned son and daughter of her best friend. Waiting for her is Will Jensen, the high school sweetheart who is now Oysterville's volunteer fire chief and a single father himself. Out of conversations in her family's kitchen and around the harbor, Caroline begins a sewing circle for women who have walked away from abusive partners and bosses, and slowly the project begins to give her her own work back. Susan Wiggs's standalone novel, published in 2019, is a quietly hopeful Pacific Northwest story about coastal community, second chances, and the women who help each other start over.
Themes & atmosphere
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When her best friend dies in their Manhattan apartment, fashion designer Caroline Shelby drives west to her family's oyster town in coastal Washington with the friend's two small children. She finds high school crush Will, a single dad, and starts a sewing circle for women in trouble.
The Oysterville Sewing Circle was written by Susan Wiggs and published in 2019. Wiggs has written more than 50 historical and contemporary romance and women's fiction novels.
The Oysterville Sewing Circle is largely a standalone, but Susan Wiggs has written several other connected coastal-Pacific Northwest novels including The Lost and Found Bookshop and Sugar and Salt.
The Oysterville Sewing Circle is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Oysterville Sewing Circle takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Oysterville Sewing Circle is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.