Sabine Wespieser, Founder and Publisher
"The acuity, poetry, humor, and concision of Maryline Desbiolles' prose lend marvelous voice and embodiment to these women history has forgotten."

Just before 1868, four very young women converge on Lyon’s silk workshops where they have found employment. As "ovalists", they will fill the spools of the oval mills, where raw silk is given the twist necessary to being woven. Taking the oval—the shape of the mill and the stadium—as a magnificent metaphor, Maryline Desbiolles portrays her four characters as relay runners, passing the baton to each other in a race that will lead them not to break a record, but to become key players in history’s first known women’s strike, in June 1869.