Savannah, Georgia Colony, 1740. Thomas Hendricks came back from war with steady hands and a rule he's kept since boyhood: don't look, don't want, don't reach.
Then William Ashford looks at him across a candlelit schoolroom, and the rule breaks.
Thomas is a transported convict turned blacksmith, a man whose body remembers violence before it remembers tenderness. William is a tailor's apprentice with careful hands and a dangerous secret. In a colony where their love is a hanging offence, every stolen glance is a gamble ? and what they find at the forge, along the bluff, in the narrow hours between duty and dawn, is a want too fierce to stay hidden.
To survive, they'll need more than each other. They'll need Mary Collingwood.
Mary is a tavern keeper with a head for numbers and a heart she's learned to keep quiet. She loved a woman once, in Charleston, and that love taught her what the world does to people who feel the wrong things for the wrong people. When she offers a marriage of protection ? her name and William's, a legal shield for a household built on trust instead of convention ? the three of them begin building something the colony has no language for: a family forged from necessity, affection, and the stubborn refusal to disappear.
But colonial Georgia is no place for quiet revolution. A sadistic master holds William's contract. War with Spain drags Thomas into the killing ground of Bloody Marsh. And when a new minister arrives with a gift for moral surveillance, the careful architecture of their lives comes under threat from the one force they cannot outwork or outrun ? institutional suspicion.
Thread and Nail is a sweeping work of literary historical fiction set in the raw, contested landscape of pre-Revolutionary America. Through a blacksmith, a tailor, and a tavern keeper, it asks what it takes to build something worth keeping in a world determined to tear it down ? and whether love, practised as craft, can endure the fire that forges it.
For readers of TJ Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain ? a story of found family, forbidden love, and the people who refuse to be erased.
