I bought the book on Saturday afternoon. At the Milford Gallery in Thorndon (a shop I am yet to exit empty handed). The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society begins as writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. A letter arrives from Dawsey, on the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb. He explains about the Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society and Juliet begins to share (witty, warm) letters with several Society members.
Set in the years immediately following the German Occupation of Guernsey in WWII, a picture builds of just how traumatic it has all been and how far-reaching the effects of the occupation. The writing is delightful! I have several collections of letters (Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf) as well as Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road (of which this novel reminded me) and, as one snoops through personal correspondence, there is something that happens in the process of writing a letter, ‘twixt pen and paper, that reveals something of the writer. Sadly this is Mary Ann Schaffer’s first and last novel. A retired bookseller and librarian, she died earlier this year just before the book was published.
I am already 200 pages in and I am revelling that tension of not want to put it down, and not wanting it to end. This is the novel that I want to read, on a wet and windy day, curled up in a big chair, fire blazing, George by my side, and gallons of tea at the ready.
Mum would have adored this book.
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