I am not much of a one for brand new books. There are exceptions, of course -- a new Sarah Waters, or the latest of Kate Atkinson's crime thrillers spring to mind, as these will be books I just have to read as soon as I can get hold of them. But my taste runs quite a bit towards older fiction, and I'm a great one for serendipity -- books that just happen to come my way by some means or other. So when, a couple of years ago, everyone was raving about this book, I didn't feel at all impelled to read it. Apart from anything else I thought the title sounded a bit cutesy, and feared the book would be whimsical and irritating. How wrong can anyone be?
I'm staying with a friend this week and this just happened to catch my eye on the bookshelf. I'm not short of reading matter, and in fact am halfway through Nicola Upson's latest Josephine Tey thriller, Two For Sorrow, of which no doubt you will hear from me soon. But I picked this up out of idle curiosity and once I'd started I simply couldn't stop. Of course it is a simply wonderful book. Set in 1946 and written in the form of letter (an epistolary novel, no less) it tells the story of Juliet Ashton, a moderately successful writer living in London, who starts corresponding with a rather ill-assorted group of people who live on the Channel island of Guernsey. Her curiosity is piqued when she learns that they formed their literary society to cover up the fact that they had just killed and roasted a pig, something absolutely forbidden by the German occupiers at the time. Soon letters are flying back and forth, and at last Juliet feels so involved in the lives of these new and unusual friends that she decides to visit the island. And her stay goes on and on...
I've seen this novel described as a comedy, which of course it is. But it is also a wholly serious and sometimes disturbing account of life on the islands, and in German prisoner of war camps, during WW2. I found many of these stories extremely moving. And some of the letters describing the reactions of the (rather unwillingly recruited) members of the literary society to the books they have been told to read actually brought tears to my eyes. Thoughtful, witty, quirky, warm-hearted, funny, sad, all at once -- if you haven't read it yet, I suggest you do so!
