Book overview
*KIRKUS STARRED REVIEW - "An engrossing saga of love set against a subtly drawn, disturbing depiction of Hitler's tyranny... Taylor's sprawling narrative is a coming-of-age story with the highest possible stakes, a tense wartime thriller, a study of faith in extremis... and an unusually intimate portrait of life in Germany as Nazism corrupts friendships and families."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY -"An immersive tale of enduring love between a British woman and a German Catholic seminarian on the eve of WWII... WWII fiction fans will be riveted."
HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY - "Strongly recommended for its emotional intensity, its action-packed plot, and the voicing of multiple characters' perspectives that gives a feel of authenticity to a story set in this turbulent time."
The Many Seas to Guernsey is a sweeping literary historical charting the forbidden love between an English writer and a German Catholic priest-in-training, while also telling the little known and still-controversial story of the German Catholic Church's accommodation with Hitler. A haunting, morally complex novel set between Guernsey and Nazi Germany that will stay with you long after the last page. From Catherine Taylor, author of Amazon no. 1 best seller Beyond The Moon.
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 that 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 to choose not only between God and the woman he loves, but between obedience and conscience as the Church he reveres is drawn ever closer to Nazism. Meanwhile fate also compels Kitty onto a path that will take her into the very heart of Hitler's 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 Nightingale, Atonement, Crooked Cross, Suite Fran