Dear Reader: Why You Need to Fall in Love With Guernsey

The Book I Read Until the Spine Gave Up

(Updated June 17, 2026/Justine Castellon) There’s a particular kind of book that doesn’t just get read, it gets lived in. You dog-ear it into submission, you lend it out and panic a little when it doesn’t come back fast enough, and eventually the spine gives up entirely and just… surrenders. For me, that book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. The title is a bit of a mouthful, honestly, and most days I just call it “Guernsey something-something potato” and trust everyone to know exactly what I mean.

If you haven’t met it yet, let me introduce you properly.

The Story, In Brief

It’s January 1946. London is still digging itself out from under the war, and Juliet Ashton, thirty-two, sharp-tongued, and recently famous for writing comic wartime columns under the pen name Izzy Bickerstaff, is on a book tour with absolutely no idea what to write next. Then a letter arrives from a stranger on the island of Guernsey.

His name is Dawsey Adams. He found her name and address in a secondhand copy of a Charles Lamb essay collection, and he’s writing on the off chance she can help him track down more books by Lamb (books being nearly impossible to come by on an island still recovering from five years of German occupation). He mentions, almost in passing, that he belongs to a book club with an extraordinary name: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Naturally, Juliet wants the whole story. And the whole story is this: during the occupation, a group of islanders got caught out past curfew after secretly feasting on a roast pig they weren’t supposed to have. Cornered by German soldiers and in desperate need of an alibi, quick-thinking Elizabeth McKenna blurted out that they’d been at a literary society meeting. There was, of course, no such society. So they had to go and invent one, on the spot, and then for real, meeting after meeting, for the rest of the war.

What starts as a research errand for Juliet becomes something far bigger. Through a flurry of letters back and forth, she falls into correspondence with the whole society, and eventually onto a boat headed straight for Guernsey itself, and a life she never planned on.

A Club Built Entirely Out of Books

Here’s what I don’t think gets talked about enough with this one: the Society isn’t just a cute framing device. Every single member of it loves a different author, for a completely different reason, and Shaffer and Barrows use that to tell you exactly who these people are without ever stopping to explain it outright.

Isola Pribby, the island’s self-taught herbalist and easily my favorite letter-writer in the whole book, is helplessly devoted to the Brontës, and she reads them the way some people watch the same comfort movie on a loop. Eben Ramsey, an old fisherman who lived through the worst of the occupation, quotes Shakespeare the way other people quote scripture, and it’s his favorite line from Antony and Cleopatra that ends up doing some of the heaviest emotional lifting in the whole book. John Booker, who spent the war impersonating an aristocrat to survive, credits Seneca, of all people, with keeping him from drinking himself into the ground. And then there’s Dawsey and Juliet, who bond from their very first exchange over Charles Lamb, a friendship (and eventually more) built entirely on the back of one dead essayist.

None of these people set out to become readers. They stumbled into it because a fake book club needed a real excuse to keep meeting, and then the books did what books do: they gave people somewhere to put their grief that wasn’t just the war. That’s the actual premise underneath the premise, and it’s why the whole thing works.

Why This One Belongs on Your Shelf
(Not Just In It)

It’s told entirely in letters, and that’s the magic trick. There’s no narrator standing between you and these people. You get Juliet’s letters, Dawsey’s letters, Isola’s rambling, glorious letters that go three tangents deep before circling back. It genuinely feels like scrolling through someone’s private correspondence, like peeking at somebody else’s Instagram, except every post is handwritten and every caption is devastatingly honest. You don’t get told who these people are. You overhear it.

It finds the joke inside the tragedy without ever cheapening either one. This is a book about a Nazi occupation, about starvation, about a concentration camp, about people who didn’t come home. And yet it is, somehow, one of the funniest books you’ll pick up. Shaffer and Barrows never let the humor undercut the horror or the horror smother the humor. They just let both be true at once, the way life actually insists on doing.

The community is the real love story. Yes, there’s a will-they-won’t-they simmering under the surface. But the book’s actual heart is a handful of ordinary islanders who turned a fake alibi into a genuine lifeline, who got through occupation by arguing about the Brontës over questionable homemade cheese pie. It’s a love letter to what books do for people, not in an abstract, greeting-card way, but in the very specific way of: this got me through the worst years of my life, and I need you to understand why.

It’s a five-hour read that stays with you for five years. Short chapters, short letters, breezy pace, and somehow it still lands like a gut-punch in exactly the places it means to.

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The Cast You’ll Wish You Knew In Real Life

Juliet Ashton — Our reluctant heroine and the closest thing this book has to us: the reader stumbling into Guernsey for the first time. She’s whip-smart, allergic to sentimentality on paper (though secretly drowning in it), and has survived the London Blitz with her sense of humor fully intact and her love life in complete disarray, including an engagement to a perfectly nice, perfectly wrong man named Mark. Juliet writes the way you wish you texted — funny, self-aware, and just vulnerable enough to break your heart when you’re not expecting it.

Dawsey Adams — The man who started it all with one shy letter about Charles Lamb. Dawsey is a farmer, a man of almost comical understatement, and the kind of quietly steady presence who says four sentences a chapter and somehow says more than everyone else combined. He’s got a stutter, a soft spot for a orphaned little girl named Kit, and absolutely no idea how devastating his restraint is to everyone around him — Juliet very much included.

Isola Pribby — The society’s resident chaos gremlin, and easily the funniest correspondent you’ll ever meet on paper. Self-taught, self-employed as an amateur potion-maker, and utterly without a filter, Isola writes letters that veer from phrenology to gossip to grief without ever pausing for breath. She is nosy, she is loyal to a fault, and she will absolutely try to read your skull bumps to determine your personality.

Amelia Maugery — The society’s soft-spoken matriarch, who first gathered the group together and has been quietly holding it — and everyone in it — up ever since. Wise, warm, and carrying grief she doesn’t often show, Amelia is the kind of person whose approval you find yourself desperately wanting within a page and a half.

Eben Ramsey — A widowed fisherman and the club’s resident poetry evangelist, whose gruff exterior hides real tenderness, especially where his grandson Eli is concerned. Eben is proof the book never lets you assume who loves literature and who doesn’t based on how someone makes a living.

Elizabeth McKenna — The society’s founder and its missing heart. Elizabeth never appears in a single letter of her own — she’s gone before the book begins — and yet she is, without question, its most vivid character. Fierce, funny, reckless with her own safety and endlessly protective of everyone else’s, Elizabeth is pieced together entirely through the memories of the people who loved her, which somehow makes her feel more real, not less. Her story is the one this whole book is quietly, devastatingly building toward.

Adelaide Addison — The society’s self-appointed moral watchdog, who writes to Juliet uninvited, purely to disapprove of everything happening on Guernsey in exhaustive detail. She is insufferable and, frankly, a gift, every ensemble needs one letter-writer you can’t wait to hear from purely because you know she’s about to be dreadful.

Why It Followed Me Into My Own Book

I don’t say this lightly: I love this book so much it snuck into my own writing. When Mike Dee and I were working on Gnight Sara / ‘Night Heck, I kept circling back to Guernsey, not the plot, but the feeling of it. That windswept, close-knit, slightly stubborn island atmosphere, where everybody knows everybody’s business and somehow that ends up being a comfort instead of a curse, worked its way into one of the settings in our book. It wasn’t a conscious “let’s borrow from Guernsey” decision so much as the place had already rented space in my head, and it made itself at home in the story without asking permission. That’s the kind of book this is. It doesn’t just stay on the shelf. It shows up later, uninvited, in your own work.

The Bottom Line

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is for anyone who has ever finished a book and immediately missed the people in it. It’s for readers who believe a good book club can save your life, because in this one, quite literally, it did. Pick it up expecting a light wartime romance. Put it down having fallen for an entire island, and maybe, like me, carrying a piece of it into whatever you write next.

If you like to read books about people who love books, this one’s for you.

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Justine Castellon is a brand strategist with an innate ability to weave compelling narratives. She seamlessly blends her professional insight with her passion for literature. Her literary works include romantic drama novels—Four Seasons, The Last Snowfall,  Gnight Sara / ‘Night Heck, and I Love You, Sunday Sunset. With her ability to tell stories that linger long after the last word, Justine leaves a mark not only in the world of branding but also in the hearts of her readers.

www.justcastellon.com

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