Set in 18th-century Spitalfields, London, Blackberry and Wild Rose is the rich and atmospheric tale of a household of Huguenot silk weavers as the pursuit of the perfect silk design leads them all into ambition, love, and betrayal.

When Esther Thorel, wife of a master silk weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel, she thinks she is doing God's will, but her good deed is not returned. Sara quickly realizes that the Thorel household is built on hypocrisy and lies and soon tires of the drudgery of life as Esther's new lady's maid. As the two women's relationship becomes increasingly fractious, Sara resolves to find out what it is that so preoccupies her mistress....

Esther has long yearned to be a silk designer. When her early water colors are dismissed by her husband, Elias, as the daubs of a foolish girl, she continues her attempts in secret. It may have been that none of them would ever have become actual silks, were it not for the presence of the extraordinarily talented Bisby Lambert in the Thorel household. Brought in by Elias to weave his master piece on the Thorel's loom in the attic of their house in Spitalfields, the strange cadence of the loom as Bisby works is like a siren call to Esther. The minute she first sets foot in the garret and sees Bisby Lambert at his loom, marks the beginning of Blackberry and Wild Rose, the most exquisite silk design Spitalfields has ever seen, and the end of the Thorel household's veneer of perfection.

As unrest among the journeyman silk weavers boils over into riot and rebellion, it leads to a devastating day of reckoning between Esther and Sara.

A Library Journal Editor's Pick of Best Debut Novels of Winter/Spring 2019.

Listening Length

9 hours and 26 minutes
Author

Sonia Velton
Narrator

Esther Wane, see all
Audible release date

May 7 2019
Language

English
Publisher

Blackstone Audio, Inc.
ASIN

B07QYB947H
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	9 hours and 26 minutes
Author	Sonia Velton
Narrator	Esther Wane, Shiromi Arserio
Audible.ca Release Date	May 07 2019
Publisher	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B07QYB947H
Best Sellers Rank	#228,475 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #14,735 in Historical Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #97,191 in Historical Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

2,113 global ratings

5 star		47%
4 star		36%
3 star		14%
2 star		3%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Denise Best

Wonderful!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 17, 2020

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I loved this story! Beautifully woven plot like the silk patterns in the story. If you like books about history, and tales of the human condition, clashing class cultures and a whole gamut of emotions, you will enjoy this book.

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RED

A wonderful read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 21, 2020

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As a weaver who has made her own drawdowns, and someone who has spun and woven with silk, I very much enjoyed learning more about the history of the silk weavers.

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Marilyn Davis

Blackberry and Wild Rose

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 29, 2020

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started slow but once I got into it I really enjoyed it

One person found this helpful

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Girlsound / Patty Smith

A master tale of master weavers

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 13, 2019

Many thanks to NetGalley, Blackstone Publishing and Sonia Velton for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are 100% my own and independent of receiving an advance copy.

This story is inspired from the real life of Anna Maria Garthwaite, a prominent designer of Spitalfields silks in the mid-eighteenth century. This story tells the tale of two characters, Esther and Sara who come from very different worlds. Esther is married to a Hugenot master silk weaver and although she is kept busy doing charity work and running the household, she craves something more. She loves to paint but what she really wants to do is design silks. But these are not times when women should want things and Esther has not done her most important job, which is to bear children, especially a son. Only a son can inherit his father’s trade and making silks has been in the Thorel family for generations. Sara, on the other hand, has been sent by her mother to London to try and make a better life for herself. She is quickly taken advantage of and before she even knows what is happening to her becomes a prostitute. Sara also yearns for more and doesn’t see why she shouldn’t have a good life. One day Esther takes notice of Sara and reaches out to help her. Sara goes to work for the Thorels and before long becomes Esther’s lady maid. This is not the life Sara envisioned for herself, emptying her lady’s chamber pot and doesn’t understand why, because of birth, she is relegated to a life of servitude. Esther is so ignorant of Sara’s life, yet she also wants to break out of the chains set upon her by the world. Esther dares to take up with Lambert, who is using Mr. Thorel’s loom to create his masterpiece and hopefully one day become a master weaver. Slowly he teaches Esther how to create a pattern and weave silk. Both woman yearn for a different life, but can they make it happen?

This one caught me by surprise. I wasn’t quite sure what I was in for but boy was I surprised. Then, to find out that it was inspired by real events - really incredible. This story is beautifully laid out, really exploring both women’s desires and the many sides there are to women. Velton stays true to their characters and never do they fall into some neat package, behaving as you would expect. You have the class struggle between Sara and Esther. Esther feels Sara should be so grateful to her for “rescuing” her, but Sara has a different perspective. Both women are pushing back against the narrow role of women in that century and have forward thinking views. The men in their lives, sadly, don’t care to see them for anything other than what they should be. So you have all of these different things at play and as a backdrop you have a volatile story of the weavers revolting against the masters. There is a strict hierarchy of weavers, similar to class structure and Lambert is striving to be something more. Then the master weavers are trying to keep their trade alive amongst the influx of new fabrics from India and China. I loved learning about the silk trade and never does the story become convoluted. There is a clear pace that accelerates with the heightened fervour of the tradesmen with time running out for both Sara and Esther. I enjoyed this read so much and was very engrossed in the story. Strong writing kept this story intact and I couldn’t put it down.

2 people found this helpful

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Fictionophile

Outstanding blend of historical and women's fiction.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 16, 2019

I thoroughly enjoyed my voyage to the past with Esther Thorel and Sara Kemp. Both were women who for various reasons were challenging to like, nonetheless their tragic story was compelling.

With themes of the appalling class divide, child labour, and lack of social support that was prevalent in the eighteenth century, the story speaks to the history of women while centering the story around the actual silk weavers revolts that took place in the 1760s.

The silk weavers laboured from sun-up until sundown to produce about a yard of silk. If someone cut a piece of silk it was considered serious enough to merit hanging.

Well written and well researched “Blackberry and Wild Rose” was an outstanding debut novel. The author took actual events and spun them into a fictional story which will delight readers who appreciate historical fiction. Highly recommended.

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Top reviews from other countries

N. D. Taylor

Really quite underwhelming

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 3, 2019

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I was really drawn to this beautiful cover and the fact that it had had so many positive reviews, some calling for fans of Sarah Waters which had me clicking that purchase button in an instant. However, although an easy read (read it over the weekend), I was left feeling really underwhelmed. Neither main characters were particularly compelling, I didn’t feel drawn to them at all. There was no clear reason why Sara fell for the man she did, nor why she acted so maliciously by telling Elias about Esther, something that ultimately brings this story to its climax. Useful as a narrative tool, just didn’t make much sense as a story. Oh well. I’ve given it away to my local charity shop and hope it will be better appreciated elsewhere.

28 people found this helpful

Kate Hopkins

For Fans of 'The Miniaturist'

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 30, 2022

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'Blackberry and Wild Rose', like Jessie Burton's debut 'The Miniaturist', explores the lives of two feisty women trapped in a repressive society: in this case, the Huguenot silk-weaving community of Spitalfields in the late 18th century. Esther Thorel is the childless wife of an autocratic master weaver who refuses to let her do the one thing she craves: to design patterns for his firm's silks. Sara Kemp was abducted by a procuress on her first day in London, and now reluctantly works in a 'house of ill repute' in the district. When Esther rescues Sara and gives her a position as her lady's maid, it seems that Sara may be spared the life of degradation and disease that she's seen many of her co-workers suffer. And when aspiring master weaver Bisby Lambert offers to teach Esther how to design and weave patterns on silk, it appears she may be able to fulfil her dream. However, Sara's reckless affair with another weaver, John Barnstaple, threatens to put both women in terrible danger...

Sonia Velton has chosen a fascinating setting for her first novel, and brings it vividly to life in elegant prose. Her descriptions of the Spitalfields area - its smells, sounds, the style of its buildings - are excellent, her writing about fabric design, weaving and clothes well researched and engrossing. One really gets a sense of what it might have been like to live at such a time, and within such a tight-knit community. Although I do feel she could have made more of the back story of the Huguenots, her account of the growing demand for cheap imported cloth from India, and her descriptions of the weavers' rebellion against their masters (not unlike that of the Luddites in the factories around the same time) are superb.

Even better is Velton's writing about her two heroines. Sara is a thoughtful study of a woman made reckless and sometimes brutal by long-term suffering, but who has somehow managed to maintain a core of humanity, as we see in the later scenes. I found Esther very interesting - an odd mixture of naivety, submissiveness, courage and downright ruthlessness as far as her work is concerned. I particularly enjoyed the passages about her work as a designer, and thought that Velton brought her story to a believable, and pleasingly unsentimental conclusion. The bond between her and Sara, and their periodic difficulties with each other, are also well captured.

Where I felt the novel fell down was in the depiction of the male characters. The one sympathetic male character - the oddly named Bisby Lambert - is so thinly sketched as to be virtually a non-person until the final scenes, and Velton could have fleshed out his relationships with both Esther and Ives in a lot more detail. And the remaining principal men are too simplistically nasty: Elias Thorel the cold yet lecherous patriarch, Monsieur Arnaud with his dirty secret, the swaggering John Barnstaple (who just needed a moustache to twirl), the fat and incompetent cook (why didn't they sack him and give Sara the job as that was what she was good at?). Velton's implication - as in many a historical novel these days - seems to be that nearly all men of the past were hypocritical sexist bullies: which is simply not true.

The lack of depth to the male characters means that the romantic element in the story tended to fall flat, and sometimes felt plain unlikely. Would a girl like Sara, who'd known plenty of unreliable men in her previous trade, really fall for a rake like John? Esther and Bisby's sudden passionate declarations of love also don't ring true, bearing in mind their rather distant relationship for much of the story. Not a work that entirely works on the human level then - but well-written and intriguing enough to make it a very pleasant 'down-time' read (I got through the lot on two train journeys, and it passed the time most agreeably) and to make me curious to read Velton's next novel.

3 people found this helpful

Hannah Beaumont

Loved it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 13, 2019

Verified Purchase

This novel came at just the right time for me; I started reading it towards the end of some hospital treatment, when I was having to spend a lot of time in oncology waiting rooms, which are not the most uplifting of places. I needed something to absorb me and to take me away from what I was going through and what was going on around me and I dove straight into this book. It is simply but cleverly written and there are elements of the book which reminded me of other novels which I enjoyed; the politics of the silk weavers reminded me of Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Bisby's fate had echoes of Tess's fate in Tess of the D'urbevilles. I was sorry to finish it.

17 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Great read!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 3, 2019

Verified Purchase

As a history nerd, historical accuracy is a big thing for me. It was wonderful to experience the research that the author, Sonia, must have put in to build a world so rich and realistic. I loved learning more about Spitalfields and the weaving of silk there along with all involved in the industry.

Blackberry and Wild Rose has the POV's of two strong-willed women in a world where women had little rights. As madam and maid, Esther and Sara both contrast and mirror each other in many ways throughout the book, all whilst both a friction and a friendship-of-sorts lingers between them. As a writer myself, I was keen to study this relationship and learnt a lot from the approach Sonia took.

Both women are the perfect shade of grey, leaving you judging their levels of stubbornness or pride as much as rooting for them and their happiness. It creates well-developed characters you cannot help but grow to know and love.

It's rare for me to say, but this was a read free of predictability where I truly felt as clueless as Esther or Sara on just what was to happen next. With them I held hope, believing things may work out like this or that, and felt their sorrow as life takes its natural path.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and learnt a lot from it. Would recommend!

14 people found this helpful

Gemma - Read A Book Gem

A fantastic historical fiction book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 21, 2021

Verified Purchase

This is a fantastic historical fiction book, covering a period in history I did not know much about previously, which is the Spitalfield riots in the 1760s in London. These came about due to a decline in silk-weaving that forced journeymen weavers to fight against pay cuts for their work.

This book follows two women who become embroiled in the riots in different ways. The first is Esther, the wife of a silk-weaver turned silk-trader and the second is Sara, a former prostitute who is employed by Esther as a lady-maid in an attempt to "rescue" her from her former life. The story is told from their alternating perspectives which is used cleverly to show their contrasting views of events and highlighting Esther's naivety versus Sara's experience of the real world as well as the overlaps in their oppression as women.

The writing is very easy to read and the plot is well paced so it is a book that you can easily race through and not want to put down as I did. The only thing stopping this from being a 5* read for me is that the writing lacked richness to add more depth to the setting and characters but it is a small criticism of an otherwise brilliant book.

2 people found this helpful

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