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HT reviewer Sonali Mujumdar picks her best reads of 2020
A gratifying tale of kindred spirits bound by their common love for literature provides balm to the soul in a difficult year
If metaphoric spaces that comfort was what one sought anxiously in this psychologically distressing year, in books I actively looked for writing that would uplift, provide solace and be a balm to the soul. The intriguingly titled The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows came highly recommended from several quarters. Published in 2008, the movie adaptation with the same name came a whole decade later.
Endearingly and wittily written, it starts off as a gratifying tale of hardy, kindred spirits bound by their common love for literature. The year is 1946. London-based writer, Juliet Ashton receives a letter written by a stranger, a pig farmer from Guernsey Island, when he chances upon The Selected Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb that had once belonged to her. It starts a chain of correspondence between her and a few inhabitants of Guernsey, who had ended up fortuitously creating a literary club to save their skins from the Germans, one drunken evening beyond curfew hours. The islanders are survivors of a cruel time, living the bucolic life amidst sweeping locales, remaining steadfast despite the scars of the just-culminated World War II. The epistolary novel brings to life the sensibilities and humaneness of various characters through the adversities of the dark Occupation years. There are good and bad guys on either side, tragedies go beyond the realm of the personal, there is collateral damage and yet, compassion prevails. Because painful shared histories will always bind people. Juliet finds a lot more than a mere story on the island.
The anecdotal afterword recounted by Annie Barrows, the niece of Mary Ann Shaffer, is just as charming, and tells how the novel germinated and took root, how a manuscript had to be seen through to its logical end and sent out into the world of readers, most of whom fell in love with it.
When the protagonist, Juliet, writes, “Perhaps there is some sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.” one wants to believe in that kind of heartwarming magic. In the The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society, I found love, light and beauty.
