The Many Seas to Guernsey

*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" - Kirkus "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" - Publishers Weekly In the last golden years before Europe erupts into WWII a young English writer and a German Roman Catholic priest-in-training meet by chance on the small British island of Guernsey - and are drawn into a forbidden, all-consuming love. Then history and duty intrude, forcing them to choose between complicity and courage in a fight for truth, freedom - and each other. A sweeping and devastating, morally complex love story that will stay with you long after the last page, from Catherine Taylor, author of 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 respo