Toronto writer Ania Szado’s skillful debut novel reminds us that even in the grand democratization of household chores, sewing remains a female discipline. The lives of mothers and daughters, it seems, are still linked one to the next with needle and thread; the sounds and rhythms of sewing machines resound in the hearts of women in a way they never can for men.

Marta Fett, the novel’s 26-year-old narrator, learns to sew at a young age at her mother’s knee. It is there that she feels most at home. When she is nine, her mother abandons her and Marta swears never to sew again. She keeps this promise until the day she makes her own wedding dress. The marriage is a disaster, the husband abusive and alcoholic, and like her mother before her, Marta plans to run away.

Before she can act, though, her husband and daughter are killed in a car wreck. Seeking redemption and a place to heal, Marta turns up on the doorstep of a Toronto church and is accepted into the parish, first as a cleaning woman, then as a caregiver to an old woman who is herself making preparations for death.

Throughout this parade of broken lives, Szado shows an immense talent for resonant and surprising imagery. “There is a way love clings to our insides, not like raindrops but like burrs. It sticks and sticks, and when we pick at it, it sticks some more, in pieces smaller and smaller and harder to grasp.” The novel’s chief flaw is a tendency to be maudlin, especially in the narrator’s imaginary letters to her dead child. The plot, as well, evolves in ways that are arbitrary and too convenient, as when an unfaithful husband disappears as suddenly as he appears.

But the more you pick at the book, the more it sticks with you. In a story that is so centred around the life of a church, religion itself plays no real role here. Ultimately, salvation does not come from above, but from the works of this world, from simple stitches.