The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I once read an interview with actress Julianne Moore, where she described characters she’s played: “Over time they become people I’ve known.” I feel that way about characters in books: they become my friends, so that the landscape of my friendships becomes peppered with Stargirl Caraway and her irrepressible individuality (Stargirl); Lyra Silvertongue’s daring adventurousness (His Dark Materials trilogy); Katherine Vigneras’s discipline for her art (The Small Rain and its sequel, The Severed Wasp).

I have added the heroine of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Juliet Ashton, to the list of my beloved fictional friends. Written by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece, Annie Barrows, Guernsey is an epistolary novel set in England after the end of World War II. Juliet wrote a series of news columns during the war under the pen name of Izzy Bickerstaff, striving to lighten the mood of a devastated Britain with words.   She travels the country promoting it, and during the tour exchanges letters with her publisher, Sidney Stark, and his sister Susan, Juliet’s best girlfriend. Upon returning home she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, a man she’s never met, who has bought a copy of a book by Charles Lamb that was once hers.

“I wonder how the book got to Guernsey?” Juliet muses in a letter to Dawsey. “Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers” (10). I’ve found that true in my own life—books come to me, by strange mechanisms, just when I most need them. Has this ever happened to you? Leave a note in the comments!

Dawsey piques Juliet’s interest by mentioning friends with whom he discussed the book, friends who gather in a club called—you guessed it—the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. As they correspond, Juliet is drawn into Dawsey’s world, discovering how their literary society began as a lie told to the Germans to cover up an illegal roast pig dinner. She writes to several other members of the society, discussing their mutual love of literature. Through their letters she hears of their friend Elizabeth, the founder of the society, who has been missing since she was sent to a concentration camp. The society is collectively raising Elizabeth’s daughter Kit, who has no memory of her mother. Juliet, captivated by her new friends, travels to Guernsey.  As she encounters members of the Society in person and hears their stories, her life changes forever.

This book is beautiful because it highlights one of the truest, deepest joys of reading: our ability to relate intimately with characters inherently different from us, characters in whom we can nevertheless sense our own humanity. The characters in Guernsey have survived WWII, have starved nearly to death on potato rations, have struggled to make a living as farmers and carpenters, publishers and market sellers in 1940’s England. And yet they creep into your heart; you find yourself thinking of them while you’re cooking dinner, counting the moments until you can return to them. When I’m reading a good book, I’m never bored. I never wonder what to do with my free time. I read in every spare moment until the book is finished. That’s exactly what I did with Guernsey.

As a lovely bonus, this book is also hilarious. I don’t often laugh out loud when reading, but with this book I’d sit on the couch alone in the living room, cracking up. When her friend Sidney sends a gift to Kit, Juliet writes to thank him: “What an inspired present you sent Kit—red satin tap shoes covered with sequins. Wherever did you find them? Where are mine?” (190). During another adventure, the fabulous Isola Pribby receives a book of phrenology from Sidney, and goes about for weeks feeling everyone’s head bumps and analyzing the effects those bumps have had on their character.

This book is perfect for book clubs. Check out a great list of thought-provoking discussion questions here.

Truly, Guernsey fulfills one of its own quotes: “Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books” (53). The goal of this blog is to do the work of hunting out the good books for you.  Happy reading!