The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows * * * * *
The novel takes place in 1946, shortly after the end of the Second World War, and follows writer Juliet Ashton. During the war, Juliet wrote a humorous newspaper column under the name Izzy Bickerstaff, which has since been collected into a successful book. Now that the war is over, however, she has no idea what she wants to write next. London is still visibly scarred by the Blitz. Her old flat overlooking the Thames was destroyed, along with almost everything she owned, and even though her book has been successful, money cannot magically restore a country still living with rationing and shortages.
Then Juliet receives a letter from a man called Dawsey Adams on the island of Guernsey. Dawsey has somehow acquired a secondhand book that once belonged to Juliet, and because her name and address are written inside it, he contacts her. During their correspondence, he mentions the wonderfully named Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and Juliet immediately wants to know more. What begins as an exchange between two strangers gradually expands as other members of the Society begin writing to her too. Through their letters, Juliet learns how the Society was created during the German occupation of Guernsey and how books became a source of companionship, distraction and sometimes genuine emotional survival.
The novel is entirely epistolary, told through letters, telegrams and other written communications. Usually this can be difficult for me because I struggle to keep large casts of characters straight, particularly when I am constantly moving between different names. The audiobook helped enormously. Different characters had distinct voices and speech patterns, so they began to feel like actual people rather than names sitting above letters on a page. In a novel where personality has to emerge almost entirely through correspondence, that made a huge difference.
These characters really did feel alive, and that was probably what I loved most about the book. Guernsey gradually stops feeling like a setting Juliet is researching and starts feeling like a place filled with people I knew. There is Dawsey, quiet and gentle and endlessly willing to help. There is wonderfully eccentric Isola, with her homemade remedies and amateur detective tendencies. There is Amelia, Eben, Eli, Kit, and, hanging over almost every story they tell, Elizabeth McKenna.
Elizabeth is perhaps the most extraordinary character in the entire novel because she is absent for almost all of it.
When Juliet first begins corresponding with the Society, Elizabeth is no longer on Guernsey. During the occupation, she was arrested by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp. Nobody knows whether she is alive. Yet she is everywhere in the book because she is everywhere in the memories of the people who knew her.
Elizabeth was the person who invented the Literary Society on the spot when a group of islanders were caught out after curfew. She was the person who stepped in when somebody needed help. She was stubborn, impulsive, brave and sometimes reckless. She was also the kind of person who could see somebody suffering and simply could not walk away. Story after story reveals another small piece of her until Juliet eventually realizes that she has found the central figure for the book she wants to write about Guernsey.
That structure is beautiful because Juliet falls in love with Elizabeth in much the same way that we do. Neither she nor the reader truly meets her. We reconstruct her from what she left behind.
The historical side of the novel was also fascinating to me because, somehow, I had never known that the Channel Islands were occupied by Germany during the Second World War. Guernsey therefore offers a perspective on the war that was completely unfamiliar to me. We hear about food shortages, curfews, deportations, the evacuation of children, slave labourers brought to the island, German fortifications, collaboration, resistance and the strange everyday compromises people made simply to continue living.
What particularly impressed me was the way the novel portrays individual German soldiers. It never pretends that the occupation was anything other than brutal, but it also refuses to reduce every German character to exactly the same kind of monster. Some are cruel. Some abuse the power occupation gives them. Others are frightened young men who are also hungry, isolated and trapped on an island during a war they did not create.
There are stories of German soldiers quietly allowing food or fuel to reach starving islanders. There are moments when individual soldiers show compassion. Elizabeth herself falls in love with Christian, a German doctor, and their relationship results in their daughter Kit. Christian is not treated as a contradiction that the novel needs to explain away. He is German and he is also a kind man. At the same time, there are islanders who collaborate with the occupiers or betray other people for their own benefit.
That moral complexity mattered to me. The book understands that nationality alone does not determine whether somebody is good.
It also shows how war continues long after the official fighting stops. The novel takes place after liberation, but nobody simply walks out of the war untouched. London is bomb damaged. Juliet has lost her home and almost everything she owned. Guernsey is physically scarred by fortifications and mines. The people Juliet meets are thinner than they should be after years of hunger. Children have been separated from their parents. Families have disappeared. People are waiting for news that may never come.
Yet somehow this is not a relentlessly bleak novel.
A lot of that comes from the humour, but even more comes from the sense of community. The Literary Society begins as an excuse to avoid punishment for breaking curfew, but it becomes something real because the people involved need it. They share food. They read books they might never otherwise have touched. They argue about authors. They irritate one another. They help each other survive. Books do not magically save them from occupation, but they give them something beyond occupation to think and talk about.
And eventually that community saves Juliet too.
Juliet has people who love her, particularly Sidney and Sophie, but she has effectively been without a family since childhood. Her parents died when she was twelve, she was sent to boarding school, and the uncle who subsequently cared for her died while she was still young. Her adult life then begins during a war. She has friends, a career and financial security, but she has never really found somewhere that feels like home.
Guernsey becomes that place.
When Juliet finally travels there in the second half of the book, it does not feel like she is arriving among strangers. She has spent months corresponding with these people. They are already her friends. They prepare Elizabeth's cottage for her. Isola recognizes her and immediately greets her like someone she has been waiting to meet. Juliet has already emotionally entered their lives before she ever physically sets foot on the island.
That is why I see The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society much more as a found family story than a romance.
The romance is there, of course. Juliet's growing feelings for Dawsey are quite obvious, even when neither of them seems capable of actually doing anything about them. But Dawsey is only one part of what Juliet falls in love with. She falls in love with Guernsey itself. She falls in love with the Society. She falls in love with Kit. She falls in love with the person Elizabeth had been. She finds a community in which caring for someone is not considered an obligation but simply something people do.
Even Juliet's relationship with Mark Reynolds helps clarify that difference. Mark is wealthy, handsome, charming and successful, and Juliet seems to spend much of their relationship thinking that she ought to want him. On paper, he represents a very comfortable future. But his proposal reveals the problem. When Juliet says she is not ready to accept, his response centres almost entirely on what he wants and why he believes they are suitable for one another. He seems baffled that she might have desires that do not align neatly with his plans.
Juliet has already had one engagement fail for a similarly revealing reason. Her previous fiancé moved her books off the shelves without even asking her and replaced them with his sporting trophies. Juliet promptly got rid of him. I loved her for that.
Her books are part of who she is. Anybody who wants Juliet without understanding that does not actually want Juliet.
SPOILERS
The emotional heart of the book, for me, is eventually discovering what happened to Elizabeth.
From the beginning, there is hope. Even when it becomes increasingly unlikely that Elizabeth survived, I kept wanting somebody to discover that she had. I wanted her to come home to Kit. I wanted all of these people who loved her to get her back. Every new story about her made that hope hurt more because Elizabeth became more vivid with every page.
And then Remy Giraud finally tells them what happened.
Elizabeth died in the concentration camp after repeatedly standing up for other prisoners. Even there, under conditions designed to destroy every trace of humanity, she remained exactly the person everyone on Guernsey remembered. She saw someone being hurt and intervened. And they killed her for it.
That destroyed me.
It was not simply that Elizabeth died. It was that she died being Elizabeth. The same instinct that made her help people throughout the occupation was still there at the end. There is something beautiful about that, but there is also something unbearably cruel about knowing how close liberation was.
Remy's arrival also adds something important to the novel because the war cannot remain safely in the past as a collection of stories. Here is a woman whose body and mind still carry what happened in the camps. Dawsey's instinct is immediately to care for her, just as Elizabeth would have done, and for a while Juliet mistakenly believes that his devotion to Remy must be romantic.
Then Isola decides to investigate. Her wonderfully chaotic attempt to determine whether Dawsey loves Remy instead reveals a collection of Juliet related objects in his home. Letters. A photograph. Little things Juliet has lost or left behind. Isola does not quite understand what she has discovered, but Juliet certainly does.
Dawsey loves her. And finally, finally, these two stubborn people work it out.
Yet even before the romance resolves itself, Juliet has already made the more important choice. She wants to stay on Guernsey, and she wants to adopt Kit. Kit has gradually chosen Juliet as her person, and Juliet has become her mother long before paperwork gives that relationship a name.
There is a beautiful sadness to Juliet eventually writing the story of Elizabeth. Kit will grow up knowing the mother who could not come home to her. She will have stories, letters, drawings and memories preserved by people who loved Elizabeth. Near the end, when Kit shows Juliet the little collection of things she has from her parents, including Elizabeth's final note, I completely lost it again.
I cried so much reading this book. I cried over Elizabeth. I cried over Kit. I cried over the animals that were killed during the occupation. I cried over people starving. I cried over the tiny acts of kindness people managed anyway.
But I also loved it.
I loved how books run through the story without the novel pretending that literature magically solves anything. Books cannot stop a war. They cannot bring Elizabeth home. What they can do is connect people. A book once owned by Juliet finds its way into Dawsey's hands, Dawsey writes a letter, and that letter eventually leads Juliet to the place where she will find her home, her family, her daughter and the man she loves.
I would absolutely recommend The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, particularly to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, epistolary novels and stories about found family. The audiobook was wonderful for me because the different voices made this large cast feel especially vivid, but whatever format you choose, be prepared for something much more emotionally complicated than the whimsical title suggests.
It is a book about war, grief and survival, but more than anything, I think it is about the strange ways people find one another after everything familiar has been taken away.
Juliet goes to Guernsey looking for a story. What she finds is home.
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