The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

Nilda Andrews

This book was on my Book of the Month Club’s recommended readings. I haven’t ordered a book from them for quite some time, usually tossing their flyer into the wastebasket. However, the title so intrigued me that I scanned their review and it totally interested me.

The setting is post-World War II just as England is wrenching itself out of the morass of war. On Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of England, an inhabitant finds a book by Charles Lamb with the previous owner’s name, Juliet Ashton, in it. He decides to correspond with her and so begins a delightful story written entirely in the form of letters between himself and his Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society compatriots.

While there is a similarity between this book and 84 Charing Cross Road, in that it is a correspondence of letters between friends, the comparison ends there. Juliet, a journalist and writer, is so captivated by their accounts, she makes a trip to Guernsey to meet the storytellers and write their stories.

This is a well-developed narrative of how friends in a time of crisis stuck together during the Nazi occupation. It is told with warmth and humor while invoking pathos for the time period. The characters are sharply defined and the dialogue between the correspondents elicit nostalgia for an era of civility that is now almost gone.

This is a fast read, but so enjoyable that I read it in two nights and was saddened it had to end. I want to make a trip to Guernsey just to see if I could find its literary inhabitants, albeit they are a work of fiction.