[3][4] The story is set in a 1950s fictional Australian country town, Dungatar, and explores love, hate and haute couture.

[8] A special film tie-in edition of the novel, featuring a new book cover with Winslet as the titular character, was released worldwide from August to October 2015.

"[14] In the 1950s, Myrtle "Tilly" Dunnage returns to her hometown of Dungatar, an Australian country town, to take care of her ill mother, Molly.

The people of Dungatar sent Tilly away at the age of ten because of false accusations of murder, after the death of fellow student Stewart Pettyman.

Sergeant Farrat, the town's policeman with an eye for beautiful fashion, liaises with Tilly in exchange for dressmaking assistance and design advice.

Ted, the eldest son of the town's poor family, begins to pursue Tilly, and tries to assist her in standing up to the vicious gossip and small-minded attitudes of the townsfolk.

She also makes her own frock, but when she and Teddy, the town's heartthrob, arrive at the dance, her name has been removed from all the tables in the hall, and one of the townsfolk blocks the door to stop her coming in.

One day Stewart Pettyman, the abusive and physical bully, cornered her and charged at her, head-down like a bull, intending to wind her and probably injure her severely.

Tilly and Teddy make love, then, later on top of a silo, he tells her of the fun he had as a boy, jumping into the town's wheat bins.

The novel probes the human emotions and behaviours and how hypocrisy, bigotry, prejudice, vanity and malice alter people's perspective and make unacceptable things acceptable and vice versa.

Love is central to the intensity of feeling that drives the main narrative line, though only covered with the utmost brevity and obliqueness.

"[18] Daneet Steffens of The Boston Globe in her review called it "Blunt, raw and more than a little fantastical, the novel exposes both the dark and the shimmering lights in our human hearts.

"[19] In a review for New South Wales Writers' Centre, Sophia Barnes gave the novel a positive review and praising Ham, wrote that "Ham has a wonderful sense of the absurdities of human character and the extremes of human behaviour, even in the humdrum domestic lives of a small town.

[27] Ham promoted the book, first at a lecture arranged by The Ewing Trust at Yarra libraries titled The Dressmaker from Page to Screen on August 6, 2015.

[28] Next she appeared at the literary lunch for the discussion of the transformation of the book to screen, which took place at Fowles Wine on August 23, 2015.

[33] In August 2013, it was announced that Kate Winslet and Judy Davis had joined the cast of the film as Myrtle "Tilly" and Molly Dunnage respectively.