Reader recommendation: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

October 19, 2010

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows was a delightful surprise. I read it as a selection of my reading club expecting whimsical humor but found a serious and vivid account of a time and place wholly unfamiliar to me. The book is a fictional account through letters written between several friends of life under the Nazi occupation of the Channel Island Isle of Guernsey during World War II. The society of the title was made up as an excuse to protect its members from arrest by the Germans. A delightful and thoughtful read.