The Red Ribbon: 'Captivates, inspires and ultimately enriches' Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz

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'Captivates, inspires and ultimately enriches' Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz Nominated for the CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL 2019 Rose, Ella, Mina and Carla. In another life we might all have been friends together. But this was Birchwood. For fans of The Diary of Anne Frank and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. As fourteen-year-old Ella begins her first day at work she steps into a world of silks, seams, scissors, pins, hems and trimmings. She is a dressmaker, but this is no ordinary sewing workshop. Hers are no ordinary clients. Ella has joined the seamstresses of Birkenau-Auschwitz, as readers may recognise it. Every dress she makes could mean the difference between life and death. And this place is all about survival. Ella seeks refuge from this reality, and from haunting memories, in her work and in the world of fashion and fabrics. She is faced with painful decisions about how far she is prepared to go to survive. Is her love of clothes and creativity nothing more than collaboration with her captors, or is it a means of staying alive? Will she fight for herself alone, or will she trust the importance of an ever-deepening friendship with Rose? One thing weaves through the colours of couture gowns and camp mud - a red ribbon, given to Ella as a symbol of hope.

Lucy Adlington is a writer and clothes historian. Her novels for teenagers, including The Diary of Pelly D, Burning Mountain and The Red Ribbon have been nominated and shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the Manchester Book Prize, the Leeds Book Prize and the Rotherham Book Award. She tours the UK with dress history presentations and writes history books for adults, including Women's Lives and Clothes in WW2: Ready for Action, and Stitches in Time: the Story of the Clothes We Wear. Find out more at www.historywardrobe.com or on Twitter: @historywardrobe

'The Red Ribbon is the best YA novel about the Holocaust I have read. The story it threads together is gripping, moving and important . . . deeply-researched, but wears its learning so lightly that the history is woven seamlessly into the fabric of the colourful story. I was especially struck by its sophisticated handling of the moral questions that the camps ask. More honest (and much more historically accurate) than the overly-simplistic fable The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, The Red Ribbon deserves to be very widely appreciated indeed, and I urge teachers and Holocaust educators especially to read it.' - Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London 'Lucy Adlington's 'The Red Ribbon' is a very worthy addition to the canon of young adult Holocaust novels and it well deserves its place alongside 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas', 'The Book Thief' and the Morris Gleitzman trilogy. I had heard of the musicians of Auschwitz before but not the clothiers although as someone who has visited the concentration camp it is poignantly ironic to contrast the mounds of clothing there with the thin striped outfits the inmates were forced to wear and as the novel shows that some were able to prolong their survival because of their dressmaking skills. Adlington does not shirk from conveying the horrors of such a place but portrays them in a sensitive manner never forgetting her target audience. She also manages to show that even in the darkest of situations compassion, friendship and humanity can never be totally extinguished. Her characters are well drawn, the prose skips along and the novel is cleverly divided into sections represented by a colour. I was particularly moved by the final part with its emphasis on hope and looking to the future without ever forgetting the past rather than on despair and retribution. This is a finely written novel about a delicate subject and one that like two of the aforementioned novels would I have no doubt translate well to the screen.' - Benjamin Peel, Skegness Library 'A Real Weepie' - My Weekly 'Lucy Adlington's read is a tear jerker. Bookworms are calling it a cross between 'The Diary of Anne Frank' and 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjama' and it's a reading list essential' - Maximum Pop 'In Auschwitz, teenagers Ella and Rose survive because they create clothes for the Commandant's wife. Despite the dark situation, the friends' compassion, friendship and humanity win out' - Candis Magazine