The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Juliet explains to Isola how she came to fall in love with the writings of the Brontë sisters when she was assigned to read Wuthering Heights in school. She describes how the Brontës’ stories gripped her to her very core, and how she came to appreciate each sister’s unique personality. Two days later, Juliet receives a letter from another Society member by the name of Eben Ramsey. Though he had initially hesitated to contact her, he revised his opinion after she gave Dawsey a book. According to Eben, though many of the Society members had not read since their school years, they forced themselves to read to substantiate Elizabeth’s lie to the German soldiers. Eben picked Selections from Shakespeare and was captivated by the beauty and relatability within the works. He wishes he had known of them in the early days of the Occupation because he believes they would have helped him face the German soldiers. He outlines the Germans’ methodic settlement of Guernsey and how they initially seemed nice, only to become dour and cruel. In the beginning, they had hoped that the occupation would only last a few months, but they were wrong, and soon basic essentials like firewood and food were hard to come by. By 1944, Eben explains, everyone went to bed at five o’clock to keep warm and ration their candles. After a while, even the soldiers were driven to starvation. Eben had to evacuate his seven-year-old grandson and miss out on five years of his young life.

Unprompted, a woman named Adelaide Addison reaches out to Juliet to dissuade her from associating herself with or writing about the members of the Society, particularly Elizabeth McKenna. She explains that Elizabeth is not an Islander by birth; rather, she summered on Guernsey with Sir Ambrose, who was her mother’s employer. When her mother died, Sir Ambrose continued to take care of her as a surrogate daughter. Adelaide decries Elizabeth and the rest of the Society as scandalous and warns Juliet away from them.

Juliet, however, declines to listen to her advice and continues her communications with the members. She writes to Eben, asking after his grandson and inquiring how Amelia managed to have a pig considering the food scarcity they faced during the Occupation. She also encourages him and the rest of the Society members not to give up hope for Elizabeth. Juliet had feared that Piers was lost in Burma in 1943, but he reappeared in Australia later on. In London, she agrees to go to the opera with Mark through a series of letters.

In early March, another member of the Society, Clovis Fossey, introduces himself to Juliet and tells her about courting the Widow Hubert in 1942. His efforts to woo her had been failing until he heard the man who was winning the Widow’s affection say he was doing so with poetry. Clovis says that a bookshop owner had recommended the Roman writer, Catallus, but Clovis found him spiteful. Eben then lent him a book by Wilfred Owen. With the help of the Society, he learned more about poetry, specifically the works of William Wordsworth, which helped him woo his now-wife, Nancy, the former Widow Hubert.

Days later, Eben responds to Juliet’s letter, telling her about the family he has lost. His daughter Jane died in childbirth, his grandson Eli was evacuated to England, and his son-in-law died in North Africa two years later. Now that he has returned to Guernsey to live with Eben, Eli is learning how to whittle and carve wood. Eben then tells Juliet how they managed to secret away the roast pig that brought about the creation of the Society by outwitting the German soldiers’ bookkeeping system. Every pig was given a birth and death certificate to keep an accurate tally of the island’s livestock. Amelia swapped the death certificate of Will Thisbee’s recently deceased pig with one of her still-living pigs and notified the authorities. None the wiser, they issued a second death certificate for the same dead pig, and Amelia, Will, and the people who would eventually become the Society were able to feast on the roast pig together. Eben then explains that Elizabeth had planned to evacuate to London with Jane because they were close friends. When Jane died, Elizabeth stayed with her family until she was taken by the Germans and sent to France, leaving her own small daughter Kit behind.

Eben’s letter is quickly followed by Dawsey’s, who tells Juliet a story about soap, wherein he and John Booker were able to use a dead pig’s fat to make soap for the ladies in the Society when the product had become scarce. He says that he feels inadequate looking after Kit and often cannot answer her many questions. His feeling of inadequacy is reinforced in Adelaide’s next letter to Juliet. She tells her how scandalous it is for Christina—called Kit—to be raised in rotation by Society members who, according to her, are giving her a less-than-proper education. She also informs Juliet that Kit’s father was a German doctor and soldier, Captain Christian Hellman, and the girl was born out of wedlock.

After breaking his leg in late March, Sidney tells Juliet via telegram that his return to England will be delayed. Juliet dissuades Sophie from flying to Australia to take care of her brother and tells her about Mark and her growing affection for him, which she is starting to believe is love. She then contacts Dawsey about Adelaide’s two blistering letters. She gives him the little knowledge she has about children from her experience with the only child she knows, Dominic, Sophie’s son.

At the end of March, John Booker, another Society member, writes to Juliet at Amelia’s prompting. He tells her that he had been drunk the night Elizabeth had created the Society as a cover story. He had chosen to read a collection of letters by Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher. He believes Seneca’s philosophy applies to his experience during the Occupation. He also explains how he and Elizabeth fooled the incoming German army into believing he was his employer, Lord Tobias Penn-Piers. The latter had run away from the island, and Elizabeth convinced Booker to impersonate him since his mother was Jewish and he would be in danger if he was truthful about his identity. The plan worked for most of the Occupation, and after the end of the war, Booker took up acting, as his impersonation had given him a taste for the art form.

Juliet then sends a copy of all the letters she’s received from the Guernsey Society members to Sidney and Piers and comments on how she seems to be living more in Guernsey than in London with how invested she is in their stories. She wonders if perhaps she should write her next book about them.

Dawsey attempts to contextualize Elizabeth’s relationship with Christian in his next letter. He explains that there were a variety of reasons why some girls dated the soldiers, ranging from the glamour of German soldiers to the need for food to simple boredom. For Elizabeth, it was love. Dawsey tells her he considered Christian a good friend. To illustrate why, he recounts a story about the period when the island went without salt. Since boiling sea water for salt would be too costly in wood, Dawsey took to filling casks with seawater in which people could boil their vegetables. One November day, he was struggling with the casks at the beach, and Christian came to help him. When he noticed the Lamb book in Dawsey’s possession, the two bonded, and Dawsey lent the book to him. From then on, Christian would often help Dawsey, and they would have extended conversations on a variety of topics. When Christian was ordered to a hospital in France and was killed by Allied bombers on the way, the head of the German hospital told Dawsey, and he broke the news to Elizabeth.

Juliet writes to Amelia about what Dawsey told her about Christian, expressing sympathy for his death and noting that though the war’s effects never seem to end, the world still moves on. The next day, Mark demands that he and Juliet go have lunch together.

In April, Will Thisbee, another Society member, tells Juliet how he, too, took up reading and eventually found solace in literature. The book he was given was Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle. It enlightened him on the matter of the soul. When he led a talk about it during a Society meeting one evening, Thompson Stubbins—another member of the Society—told them he had been kicked out of the Friends of Sigmund Freud society for debating Freud’s concept that the ego stemmed from a fear of not having a soul. Will and Thompson became closer friends after the discussion, and Will credits their friendship to Carlyle.

Clara Saussey had a different experience from other Society members, as she explains to Juliet in her letter. She had wanted to discuss a cookery book, but as starvation and rationing had settled in, her presentation on different recipes tormented the other members. Despite Eben’s attempts to apologize, Clara quit the Society. She informs Juliet that, were it not for the Occupation, none of the Society members would have touched a book.

Amelia shares her thoughts about death and the war with Juliet, noting that while there is no end to death, there is perhaps an end to the sorrow of its experience. She notes that the landscape of Guernsey changed before, during, and after the Occupation, often reflecting the violence of war. Since Hitler thought the Channel Islands would be a good stepping stone into England, they were fortified by Todt workers, enslaved people from the continent forcibly brought to do the soldiers’ bidding in 1942. They would be worked under the Death by Exhaustion plan and would only be given half a day on Sundays to scrounge for food. Thousands died on Guernsey alone.

Despite claiming she would no longer write to Juliet in her last letter, Adelaide sends another, bemoaning Dawsey’s habit of reading Charles Lamb in his barnyard. Juliet finds this endearing, as it reminds her of doing something similar as a child. In her next letter, she tells him as much and lets him know that her bookshop acquaintance has found him another book by Lamb and will be sending it over shortly. Meanwhile, Susan sends a missive imploring Sidney to come back quickly because his partner at Stephens & Stark, Charlie Stephens, cannot manage the company. She also reports that she saw Juliet and Mark Reynolds together at a café, and when she greeted them, Mark had unsettled her.