Subject Guides » Books » Reading Lists » The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society

In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.

Related Fiction

Books About Book Clubs

• Jane Austen Book Club
  Karen Jane Fowler
  As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love, in a comedy of contemporary manners
• Reading Lolita in Tehran
  Azar Nafisi
  The author describes growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the group of young women who came together at her home in secret every Thursday to read and discuss great books of Western literature.
• Dinner with Anna Karenina
  Gloria Goldreich
  Six very different women, drawn together by their love of literature, get together each month to discuss their favorite novels, as well as to rally around each other when painful truths and dark betrayals are revealed, forcing them all to examine their own lives.
• They did it with Love
  Kate Morgenroth
  Moving to the Connecticut suburbs from Manhattan to find a more peaceful way of life, Sofie and her husband find their idyllic community rocked by the murder of a member of Sofie's new neighborhood book club.
• The Reading Group
  Elizabeth Noble
  Five women meet regularly to discuss books and they are changed as they bond together while facing crises in their lives, such as a wedding, a mother with dementia, an unmarried pregnant daughter, and philandering husbands.
• Summer Reading
  Hilma Wolitzer
  The lives of three very different women--Lissy Snyder, an insecure newlywed and unwilling stepmother; her nosey housecleaner, Michelle; and Angela Graves, the head of a local book group--intersect over the course of a summer in the Hamptons.
• Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons
  Lorna Landvik
  From the initial formation of The Freesia Court Book Club and over the course of the next thirty years, five women in small-town Minnesota share the events, triumphs, tragedies, hardships, joys, and sorrows of their lives.
• The Sweetgum Knit Lit Society
  by Beth Patillo
  

Epistolary Fiction

• 84 Charing Cross Road
  Helene Hanff
  Correspondence chiefly between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel.
• Alice's Tulips
  Sandra Dallas
  An evocation of the day-to-day life of women in the Civil War era follows Alice, whose husband has left their Iowa farm for the war, as she copes with the farm and lives normally, until suddenly being accused of murder. By the author of The Persian Pickle Club. 40,000 first printing.
• The White Tiger
  Aravind Adiga
  Relocating to New Delhi when he is offered a new job, Balram Halwai is disillusioned by the city's twenty-first-century materialism and technology-spawned violence, a circumstance that forces him to question his loyalties, ambitions, and past.
• The Letters
  Luanne Rice
  A series of letters reveals the emotional odyssey and evolution of one couple's relationship as they fall in love, confront the loss of an adult child, and struggle to rediscover who they each are and what they mean to each other in the wake of the tragedy.

World War II

• The Zookeeper's Wife
  Diane Ackerman
  Documents the true story of Warsaw Zoo keepers and resistance activists Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who in the aftermath of Germany's invasion of Poland saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish citizens by smuggling them into empty cages and their home villa.
• Skeletons at the Feast
  Chris Bohjalian
  During the final months of World War II, a small group of people make their way westward across a ravaged Europe in a desperate attempt to reach British and American lines.
• Suite Francais
  Irène Némirovsky ; translated by Sandra Smith
  Published more than sixty years following the author's death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"A Storm in June, " set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
• The Reader
  Bernhard Schlink
  At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime.
• Land Girls
  Angela Huth
  In 1941, desperate for assistance, John and Faith Lawrence hire three very differnt young women--Prue, a Manchester hairdresser; Agatha, an intellectual Cambridge undergraduate; and Stella, devastated by separation from her lover--to take the place of farmhands off serving their country.
• Sarah's Key
  Tatiana de Rosnay
  On the anniversary of the roundup of Jews by the French police in Paris, Julia is asked to write an article on this dark episode and embarks on an investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah.

Related Non-Fiction

• A Short History of the Channel Islands
  John Uttley
  A history of the Channel Islands from prehistoric times, the wars between England and France, and the German occupation in World War II.

DVD & VHS

• Jane Austen Book Club
  As five women and one man meet to discuss the works of Jane Austen, they find their love lives playing out in a 21st century version of her novels.
• 84 Charing Cross Road
  An American writer forms an enduring relationship with a London bookseller which is carried on over 20 years and across two continents.
• Island at War
  One of the little known stories of World War II is the fate of the tiny Channel Islands, the only part of the British Isles invaded and occupied by the Germans. Drawing on the real experiences of survivors, this Masterpiece Theatre drama tells the story through the eyes of three island families and the German soldiers with whom their lives become intertwined. Heart-pounding suspense and unexpected romance unfold in an atmosphere suffused with the moral ambiguity of war.
• Foyles War
  This intriguing Masterpiece Theatre miniseries is set during World War II in the villages along England's south coast. Michael Kitchen stars as stoic detective Christopher Foyle, who wants desperately "to be more relevant to the war effort." But as he discovers in this quartet of mysteries, just because he is far from the front lines, doesn't mean he is far from the action.
• Land Girls
  With the nation's men at war, three beautiful young English volunteers arrive at a farm to help the cause under the land girls program. Yet even the peaceful English countryside cannot escape the flames of the war and soon it touches them all in a way that will alter their lives forever.

Websites

• www.visitguernsey.com
• www.anniebarrows.com