Book excerpt: 'I would like to make things beautiful, but a tawdry and repulsive kind of beauty. A braver sort than people have from birth. Sexy zombies on a bicep. That sort of thing.' Ces longs to be a tattoo artist and embroider skin with beautiful images. But for now she's just trying to reach adulthood without falling apart. Powerful, poetic and disturbing, Needlework is a girl's meditation on her efforts to maintain her bodily and spiritual integrity in the face of abuse, violation and neglect.