Good Reads – Hungry for Words
 
“The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society”
By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Dial Press, $22

Granted the title is a mouthful, but “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society” is a delicious read. If you didn’t already devour it on the beach this summer, carve out some time this fall for afternoon tea and turn off the phone.
It’s January 1946 and writer Juliet Ashton is adrift. She’s returned home to London after the war, but everything is different, her world upended. Her flat having been destroyed by a bomb, she’s living in borrowed quarters; there’s no man in her life and she’s struggling with her next book.
Her world turns upside down again when she receives a letter from a complete stranger, one Dawsey Adams, a resident of Guernsey, who has a book of essays by Charles Lamb that once belonged to her. He writes to tell Juliet that during the five-year German occupation of the island Charles Lamb made him laugh and he feels a kinship to him. There are no longer any bookshops on Guernsey and he asks Juliet for the names of bookshops he can write to in London for more books by Mr. Lamb.
Juliet writes back, “I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.”
Their correspondence blossoms, and she’s soon receiving letters from Adams’ neighbors, too, and learning about the book club they formed during the war and the friendships that resulted.
Meanwhile, a dashing and wealthy American publisher, Markham Reynolds, enters the picture. He admires her wartime correspondence and sends her flowers every day until she agrees to meet him.
In two months’ time he asks her to marry him, but she hesitates. She’d been engaged and all set to marry a decent fellow before the war ended, but cancelled the wedding when she discovered that he didn’t truly share her love of books and words. While swept off her feet by Mark, she wants to be sure. She realizes she knows very little about him other than he’s a catch. The more he pushes, the surer she is that she must go to Guernsey and meet her correspondents.
Deprived of just about everything during the war, Guernsey residents are hungry for conversations with the outside world. When Juliet arrives, it’s love at first sight, and it’s not long before she finds the perfect subject.
This delightful book has another story worth telling. As Mary Ann Shaffer writes in her acknowledgements, shortly after the manuscript was sold she became seriously ill. Her niece, Annie Barrows, stepped in to help. “Without blinking an eye, she put down the book she was writing, pushed up her sleeves, and set to work on my manuscript.”
— Robin Jovanovich