The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: I can see why this story resonates with so many BookCrossers: it’s all about people connecting through books. The setting is England, 1946, and everyone is still recovering from World War II. Journalist Juliet Ashton receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, a man living on Guernsey Island who purchased a secondhand book with her address inside the front cover. He writes her to ask for the addresses of bookshops he could contact to get more books by Charles Lamb. Thus Juliet is introduced to the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a group formed during the German occupation of the Channel Islands. I feel a little silly for not knowing about the occupation, though WWII was never covered in any depth in my schooling.
I am so in love with this book. It’s told as a more realistic epistolary than most, in that people actually write the way most people write letters, as opposed to sharing novels with verbatim dialogue and fancy descriptive passages. Even so, the characters are unique, believable, and very memorable. I laughed out loud; I got choked up; I worried; I cheered. In other words, I was completely sucked in to the story. I didn’t want it to end. Highly recommended.
Also posted on BookCrossing.