Available at all Tzomet Hasfarim Bookstores.

300 pps. NIS 49.

Reviewed by Rolly King Kohansky

The title alone was intriguing enough to compel me to read this book.

And I wasn’t disappointed.

It concerns a woman who falls in love with an island. Okay, not just any island but a specific one, including all its inhabitants.

We are in postwar Britain, circa 1946. Juliet Ashton is a fairly successful journalist whose popular weekly newspaper columns, “Izzy Biggerstaff Goes to War,” have been turned into a book by her publisher and she is on the road touting the book.

During the tour, despite its success, she finds herself exhausted and depressed because her reputation has been built on the lighthearted columns. She wants to tackle something fresh, new, meatier to lift her spirits, a subject that will express her true journalistic talents.

Although her home has been bombed out during the blitz and she is living in a rented flat, a letter from an unknown person finds its way to her. The writer is Dawsey Adams, Guernsey farmer in the Channel Islands, who informs her that he has come into possession of a book by Charles Lamb in which her name appears on the flyleaf as the owner. Since there are no bookstores in Guernsey he asks her to recommend a bookstore in London which would be willing to find more of Lamb’s works and mail them to him.

Thus begins Juliet’s involvement with Guernsey. And, subsequently, the subject of her future longed-for important work.

The story unfolds through a series of letters between the Guernsey inhabitants and Juliet, as well as those flying to and fro between her and her publisher and friends. (84 Charing Cross Road comes to mind). Amazingly enough, the letters and their responses seem to magically appear on the same day. All before email, too!

 Through those letters she and we learn how the population coped with living under the occupation of the German army. Situated in the Channel between England and France, it was of major strategic importance to Germany and of painful, depressing frustration to its inhabitants since it was literally within sight of Britain.

 The unusual name of the book evolved from a club established on the spur of the moment by a group of the inhabitants a little the worse for drink. Having just polished off a forbidden dinner of roast pig (most of the food had been taken over by the Germans), they were intercepted by the enemy as they were trying to sneak home after curfew. On the spot they invented the name of a nonexistent literary society, claiming they had stayed too long at the meeting since it had been so interesting. Surprisingly enough, the Germans accepted their excuses and allowed them to continue on home. The dinner had been completed with a pie made of mashed potatoes colored with beet juice and a crust created from potato peels, thus giving the club its name.

The “mythical” Literary Society became a regular event and continued to flourish, each member of the group instructed to read a particular book and discuss it with the others.

The story might have naturally veered into the realm of artsy-cutesy, with its host of characters running the gamut from those fraternizing with the enemy; an out-of-wedlock child fathered by a “good, blonde handsome German soldier;” busy-bodies; folks just too good to be true; an admired heroine whose narrative we learn about through the others’ conversations but who never actually appears - she has been sent to a concentration camp for aiding one of the unfortunate Polish slave workers, and a Jewish butler who takes over the persona of his employer and lives out the war as Lord of the Manor.

The wit, charm and tongue-in-cheek humor and sheer gutsiness of these people strike a responsive, sympathetic chord in the reader so that we are compelled to admire and even fall in love with the characters. Just as Juliet did.

After all, this is about how the people of Guernsey coped on a day-to-day basis with the stark reality of living under German occupation, how they learned to live with it, helped one another overcome some truly dismal, awful events and even managed to laugh. We are allowed to eavesdrop on their literary evenings as they discuss good English writers: Shakespeare, Carlyle, Austen, the Brontes and Lamb among others. The comments on these writers by people who might be considered rather unsophisticated  make for some hilarious moments as well as expressing some astute observations.

The book is filled with winsome and sometimes graphic details about the people, the land and the times during which the action takes place.

As the Guernsey inhabitants might express it, this is a jolly good read.

Unfortunately, the writer, Mary Ann Shaffer, did not live to see her first and only novel become an international bestseller. She fell ill while writing it and the work was completed by her niece, Annie Barrows, a writer of some note.