The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
http://amzn.to/aj4b2D (goes to amazon).
reading this book was a happy accident--i had gone over to visit a very dear friend of my folks who i visit whenever i am in cleveland and she mentioned that she had just finished a book and would like to loan it to me. well, i had just finished a book and i love her dearly, so i thought what the hell, even though it didn't sound especially like my sort of book--i feared it would be eat, pray, love-like and that book doesn't sound appealing to me at all. it was an epistolary novel and there was some hope that it might be more like 84 charing cross road or something. and i do like epistolary novels as a form (for example, i adore Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by 1crowdedhour).
anyway, i loved it. yes it is somewhat sniffly-making and has a romance as an underlying theme, but it is also about literature and art and how they help us through terrible times. it takes place mostly on guernsey, which is one of the channel islands, right after the end of the german occupation. a writer enters into a correspondence with some of the people there who had formed a literary society, becomes intrigued, and decides to visit to write an article about the society and becomes enmeshed in local doings. the writer is the heroine, but there is also an offstage character who founded the literary society and was later imprisoned by the germans. letters and stories reveal more and more about both of them.
apparently it was ever so popular, but i had never heard of it. which is lucky because nothing put me off of it and i'm very glad to have spent some time reading it. i'll probably get a copy at some point--it is certainly a book that one is tempted to lend out to people.
reading this book was a happy accident--i had gone over to visit a very dear friend of my folks who i visit whenever i am in cleveland and she mentioned that she had just finished a book and would like to loan it to me. well, i had just finished a book and i love her dearly, so i thought what the hell, even though it didn't sound especially like my sort of book--i feared it would be eat, pray, love-like and that book doesn't sound appealing to me at all. it was an epistolary novel and there was some hope that it might be more like 84 charing cross road or something. and i do like epistolary novels as a form (for example, i adore Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by 1crowdedhour).
anyway, i loved it. yes it is somewhat sniffly-making and has a romance as an underlying theme, but it is also about literature and art and how they help us through terrible times. it takes place mostly on guernsey, which is one of the channel islands, right after the end of the german occupation. a writer enters into a correspondence with some of the people there who had formed a literary society, becomes intrigued, and decides to visit to write an article about the society and becomes enmeshed in local doings. the writer is the heroine, but there is also an offstage character who founded the literary society and was later imprisoned by the germans. letters and stories reveal more and more about both of them.
apparently it was ever so popular, but i had never heard of it. which is lucky because nothing put me off of it and i'm very glad to have spent some time reading it. i'll probably get a copy at some point--it is certainly a book that one is tempted to lend out to people.