Book Summary and Reviews of Four Red Sweaters by Lucy Adlington

Four Red Sweaters by Lucy Adlington

Four Red Sweaters

Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust

by Lucy Adlington

  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Published:
  • Mar 2025, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz tells the stories of four Jewish girls during the Holocaust, strangers whose lives were unknowingly linked by everyday garments, revealing how the ordinary can connect us in extraordinary ways.

Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives. In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning clothes historian Lucy Adlington documents their stories, knitting together the experiences that fragmented their families and their lives.

Adlington immortalizes these young women whose resilience, skills, strength, and kindness accompanied them through the darkest events in human history. A powerful reminder of the suffering they endured and a celebration of courage, love, and tenacity, this moving and original work illuminates moments long lost to history, now pieced back together by a simple garment.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Novelistic and wrenching, this serves as a poignant testament to the unconquerability of the human spirit." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[An] engrossing account...tracking wartime horrors, and resilience, through cherished garments." —Kirkus Reviews

This information about Four Red Sweaters was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Lucy Adlington

Lucy Adlington is a British novelist and clothes historian with more than twenty years' experience researching social history and writing fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Yorkshire, England.

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