After a tragic loss, a woman becomes obsessed with knitting and hoarding magnificent little sweaters. When one of them is inadvertently shipped to Chile, it's stolen by a poverty-stricken single mother, and the two women are connected in more ways than one.
Irene's life in a privileged neighborhood of small town Canada is all going according to plan. But when she loses a child to sudden infant death, she is unable to cope. That is, until she rediscovers the joy and comfort of knitting. So she begins. The problem is that she never stops. She is extremely gifted, and in her obsession, she designs a series of beautiful sweaters, and she fills the house with piles and piles of extraordinary woolen creations.
Finally, desperate to see an end to the hoarding, her husband secretly donates the sweaters to a charity. While most of the sweaters are sold locally, one of them is inadvertently shipped off to Chile where Columba, a poor single mother who works at a used clothes depot, steals it. Columba is also struggling with the loss of a child, albeit in entirely different circumstances. But like Irene, she finds solace in the little sweater. And besides, if she hadn't rescued it, it would have languished amidst the tons of North American throw-aways in the garment cemetery of the Atacama Desert. The sweater isn't the only thing she steals but it's the most significant. What happens when her thievery is found out?
Back in Canada, Irene's sweaters are sold through a boutique and they become a hot item-to the point where they give rise to a local sweater cult. But when Irene spies her sweaters in the store window and then sees strange children wearing them on the street, she's outraged. She begins to steal them back and it all gets very out of hand. Meanwhile, in Chile, Columba is so grateful for the miraculous little sweater that she conceives a way to share its mystical powers with her neighbours. But it doesn't end there. It never ends there.
Sprinkled with magic realism and humor, the story exposes cultural differences, social inequities and global environmental damage caused by hyper-consumerism. But it's really about two women in search of consolation and it's about our shared humanity.
