HYDERABAD: Mary Ann Shaffer’s is perhaps the most inspiring story of all writers. Especially for procrastinating writers, people who came into writing really late, and writers for whom the real world problem of procuring the daily bread has taken them away from writing. Mary Anne Shaffer is the inspiring writer they should read about. Shaffer wrote her first book when she was 73. It was a story which germinated during an idyllic vacation to a not-very-well-known island, nearly 40 years ago.
Are you listening, Procrastination? Due to ill health, Shaffer could not complete her book, and her niece, the children’s writer Annie Barrows had to take her, and the book to the finishing line. Shaffer died before the book was published. That book was ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, the most joyful and uplifting book if there ever was one. Dear writer, trust yourself, you have your Guernsey Literary in you. And you are never too late to start.
Elizabeth McKenna is dead, one thinks. She is lost to the war. The second big one. But she lives on in the hearts and minds of her friends and neighbors and the people whose lives she touched. She lived in Guernsey, an island along the English Channel which is part of the United Kingdom, and the only part of British soil that was occupied by the Germans.
The war is over now, and the Allied forces have won. The Germans are not there anymore, normalcy is slowly returning to Guernsey and its quaint old-world folks, but things is not quite the same. This is an epistolatory novel, one that is written in the form of letters. The main letter writer of this novel is the lead character, Juliet Ashton. She is a young British writer, and was a war journalist previously. Now that the war is over, she is coming to terms with the aftermath.
One day, she gets a letter from a pig farmer from Guernsey, a Dawsey Adams, who had found her address in a copy of a book by Charles and Mary Lamb, which was previously owned by Juliet. This starts a communication with the gentle, mellow folks of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a society formed on the spur of the moment by the aforementioned Elizabeth McKenna – and which saved the lives of a fair few of the islanders. How? Because Elizabeth and her friends, which included Dawsey, had inadvertently broken an evening curfew, which was imposed by the Germans on the German-occupied Island.
An inadvertent-delay-due-to-literary-society-event was not as much frowned upon by the Germans as feast-and-revelry. Juliet exchanges letters with Dawsey and the other members of the society, and slowly integrates herself with the people, their island, their lives, their memories of Elizabeth, and their love of books. Until one day, she sets sail from London and lands up in the island. May all books have a soul like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.