Burning Silk

Burning Silk, the debut novel by Destiny Kinal, is a sensual adventure that begins where textiles and fragrances interlace among the women at the helm of a new silk enterprise in the craftsmaking community of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In this forgotten chapter of history, saliva and silkworms are the tools of industry and women must struggle to wrest the dominion of their business from the hands of men. The first in a trilogy, Burning Silk introduces the saga of the Duladier House of Silk through the tale of its youngest maitresse, Catherine, during her migration from France to expand her family’s business to the New World. Catherine must protect both her silkworms and herself from parfumiers out to exploit the fragrance of passion, all the while struggling to uphold her role as the head of her magnanerie against a personal secret that threatens to unravel everything. Burning Silk is a novel infused with eroticism, which explores family, gender, love, dishonesty, and the risk that others might recognize something in us that we will not. Kinal spins a story richly woven with the history of silk guilds and of the matrilineal Native American metis, and, as the transformations of her characters come to parallel the metamorphoses of the moths, a profound analogy about what it really means to be a woman.