In the last golden years before Europe erupts into WWII a young English writer and a German Roman Catholic priest-in-training meet by chance on the small British island of Guernsey – and are drawn into a forbidden, all-consuming love. Then history and duty intrude, forcing them to choose between complicity and courage in a fight for truth, freedom – and each other. A sweeping, morally complex love story that will stay with you long after the last page, from Catherine Taylor, author of no. 1 best seller Beyond The Moon, shortlisted for the Orion/eHarmony Love Story Prize and longlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize.
In 1936 Kitty Garland-Fry moves to Guernsey with her bohemian, artist parents and unruly siblings. Marooned amid her family’s chaotic lifestyle, Kitty, a passionate writer of fairy tales, fears she’ll die of boredom and frustration if she cannot find a life of her own. In Nazi Berlin, meanwhile, Lukas von Harnitz, an idealistic and devout Roman Catholic seminarian, is reluctantly leaving for Guernsey, too, forced to interrupt his priestly studies for a year to take his newly widowed English-born mother back home to safety. Fiercely anti-Nazi, he can’t help feeling he’s abandoning both his country and his calling at a moment of gathering darkness.
Two fish out of water together, Kitty and Lukas are drawn together in their shared loneliness. Bonding over poetry and books, their days unfold like a quiet, sunlit dream on white sand beaches beneath endless blue skies, sheltered from both the pull of responsibility and the gathering storm of war. But then friendship begins to deepen into something more, and Lukas is forced into a devastating choice between God and the woman he loves, while fate also compels Kitty onto a path that will take her into the very heart of Nazi Germany.
Charting the road to war from both the British and German perspectives, The Many Seas to Guernsey is an emotional, character-driven epic grappling with themes of faith, conscience and the power of love in an age of extremes. Moving from the secluded turquoise coves of Guernsey to the towering Bavarian Alps, then the Gestapo cells of pre-war Berlin and finally the hellish beaches of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation, The Many Seas to Guernsey is the first in a planned duology and will appeal to fans of novels like All the Light We Cannot See, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Crooked Cross, The Nightingale, The Bronze Horseman and Atonement.
Catherine Taylor is a former journalist, starting off her career at the Guernsey Evening Press, and ending up at Dow Jones News, where she wrote for the newswire and The Wall Street Journal Europe. She was born and brought up on Guernsey, where her own family experienced the German occupation and evacuation, then went on to study German history and language, giving rise to a lifelong passion for the history of the two world wars. She lives in West London with her husband, two children and five cats.
**NB This story unfolds against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. It contains depictions of violence, imprisonment, war crimes, sexual abuse and themes of loss and grief that some readers may find distressing.
What did I think?
It's never easy to read books set in this period but I think it's important to be reminded of events in Nazi Germany leading up to the start of World War II. The Many Seas to Guernsey leads us in gently starting with a idyllic island setting that is a stark contrast to the brutality and violence of pre-war Germany.
This is the story of Kitty and Lukas but it's not a traditional love story as Lukas is training to be priest. It is clear that they are drawn to one another though and Lukas has to make a difficult choice between Kitty and God. Kitty is part of a very unconventional family, which perhaps explains her willingness to take risks and travel so far from home and fate sees her crossing paths with Lukas once again.
The story is told in three parts covering 1936-1937, 1938-1939 and 1939-1940. There is such a lot going on in such a short period of time and it's only the start of the war so there is worse to come. It's good to have such relatable main characters to add some light and hope to the darkness of the storyline.
It's a very emotional story with shocking and devastating moments that really hit me where it hurts. Catherine Taylor vividly recreates some of the horrific events leading up to the outbreak of war and it gave me chills when I was reading. I was invested in the characters from the start so I felt every emotion with them and I admit to shedding a tear or two over the course of the book.
Haunting, poignant and powerful, The Many Seas to Guernsey is a vivid and emotional historical fiction novel that pulled at my heartstrings and kept me captivated. I'm delighted that it's part of a duology and can't wait to read what happens next.
I received a gifted paperback for the Tandem Collective readalong and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.
