The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Shaffer
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel set just after the Second World War, in which a London writer discovers a book club that formed on German-occupied Guernsey as a cover story to avoid arrest. Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows tell the whole thing in letters, and use the accidental society to uncover what the island endured during five years of occupation. It is a warm novel about how reading held a community together, wrapped around a much darker account of hunger, deportation and a woman who did not come back.
- 1The Channel Islands were the only British soil occupied by Germany during the war, and Guernsey was cut off and starved, especially after D-Day severed supply lines.
- 2The society was invented on the spot when islanders caught breaking curfew after an illegal roast pig dinner told a German patrol they had been at a literary meeting.
- 3Juliet Ashton, a writer in 1946 London, begins corresponding with the members after a Guernsey man, Dawsey Adams, writes to her about a secondhand book of Charles Lamb's essays that once belonged to her.
- 4Elizabeth McKenna, who founded the society and named the potato peel pie, was deported to a continental concentration camp for hiding an escaped slave labourer and never returned.
- 5Elizabeth left a small daughter, Kit, fathered by a German officer, whom the islanders are raising communally.
- 6Juliet travels to Guernsey to write about the society, falls in love with the island and its people, and eventually with Dawsey.
Key ideas
A book club born from a lie
The society exists because Elizabeth improvised an excuse to a German patrol, and the islanders then had to actually hold meetings in case they were checked. People who had never read for pleasure were handed books, and several of them, notably the pig farmer's household, found that literature genuinely carried them through the occupation. The comic origin becomes the novel's most serious point about what reading is for.
The occupation underneath the charm
For all its lightness, the book is precise about what happened on Guernsey: signposts removed, radios confiscated, food requisitioned until people ate limpets and boiled potato peel, and thousands of slave labourers from across occupied Europe worked to death building fortifications. Shaffer lets the members reveal this gradually, so the reader arrives at the horror the way Juliet does.
Elizabeth as the absent centre
The society's founder is gone before the novel begins, and the entire book is an act of reconstructing her from other people's letters. She sheltered a starving Todt worker named Ludwig, was caught, and was sent to Ravensbruck, where she was killed for defending another prisoner. Her courage is the thing every character is circling.
The epistolary form as community
There is no single narrator. The story is assembled from letters between Juliet, her publisher Sidney, her friend Sophie, and a dozen islanders, so the reader hears each voice directly. The form itself argues the book's theme: a community is a network of correspondence, and a person can be known through the accumulation of what others say to and about them.
Kit, and family made by choice
Elizabeth's daughter is being raised by the whole society, chiefly by Dawsey and the eccentric Amelia. Kit's parentage, a Guernsey woman and a German officer who was himself decent, complicates every easy story about the occupation. The island's decision to love the child rather than judge her origins is the novel's quiet moral.
Juliet finding where she belongs
Juliet arrives as a journalist and a Londoner exhausted by the war and by a shallow American suitor, Mark Reynolds. Guernsey offers her the opposite: a place, a purpose in writing Elizabeth's story, and a family in Kit and Dawsey. Her romance with Dawsey is understated, built entirely through letters and small courtesies.
Who is it for?
Readers who love warm, character-rich historical fiction and do not mind an epistolary structure will find this a delight, and it is one of the most beloved book club novels of its era for exactly that reason. It suits anyone curious about the occupation of the Channel Islands, a corner of the war rarely covered in fiction. If you enjoyed 84 Charing Cross Road or The Bookshop, its love of books and letters will feel like home.
Full summary
It is 1946. Juliet Ashton is a London writer who spent the war producing a popular humorous newspaper column and is now casting about for a subject for her next book, while fending off her charming, overbearing American publisher-suitor Mark Reynolds.
A letter arrives from a stranger, Dawsey Adams of Guernsey, who has come to own a secondhand book of Charles Lamb's essays with Juliet's name and old address inside it. He asks her help finding more Lamb, and mentions, in passing, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
Intrigued, Juliet writes to the society's members and receives a flood of replies. She learns how it began: a group caught out after curfew, having secretly slaughtered and eaten a pig they had hidden from the Germans, invented a literary society to explain themselves, and then had to make it real.
Through the letters the occupation comes into focus. The islanders describe evacuated children, confiscated wirelesses, a population reduced to eating whatever it could find, and the vast slave-labour operation that built the island's concrete defences. The tone shifts from comic to grave without ever losing its warmth.
Juliet also learns about Elizabeth McKenna, who founded the society, named the notorious potato peel pie, and is not among the correspondents. Elizabeth hid an escaped Todt labourer, was arrested, and was deported to a camp on the continent, leaving behind an infant daughter, Kit.
Juliet sails to Guernsey to meet everyone and to write Elizabeth's story. She is taken in completely: she stays in Elizabeth's cottage, becomes attached to Kit, and finds the island and its blunt, generous people far more real to her than her London life.
Mark follows her and proposes; she realises she does not want the life he offers. Meanwhile she and Dawsey circle each other shyly, each assuming the other is attached elsewhere. Isola, the most eccentric member, eventually forces the misunderstanding into the open.
Confirmation arrives that Elizabeth died at Ravensbruck, shot for attacking a guard who was beating another prisoner. Juliet decides to stay on Guernsey, adopt Kit, and marry Dawsey, turning her book about the society into the story of a family and a place she has chosen.
