I love Deborah Levy’s storytelling and prose, building worlds that are equally realistic as well as bizarre and comical. I enjoyed the child-parent tensions in this novel, the coming-of-age of grown ups forging their own paths. The realisation that sometimes parents and their children can’t be friends and that expectations can be suffocating. 
I also enjoyed the link to textile crafts, the allegory of speaking through the needle made absolute sense to me as a sewist!