The Wartime Book Club
Kate Thompson has set her novel in the Channel Islands, bringing vividly to life the experiences of Jersey residents between 1940 and 1945, when the island was under enemy occupation. This was the only German-occupied territory where there was no armed resistance, which has attracted some adverse comment. Thompson seeks to rectify this. She has included details of her research into the historical background in an appendix. Not all the characters are fictional, and actual events are included. The imprisonment of islanders for perceived insults to the occupiers or disobeying Nazi regulations, and the transportation of some to German concentration camps were very real.
Action centres round the public library and its chief librarian, Grace. Convinced of the power of books to transform and enrich ordinary lives, the wartime occupation prompts Grace to start a book club to help islanders survive in extraordinary times. As she says towards the end of the novel: ‘bad times are good for books.’ The focus of the story is the group regularly attending the book club, as we follow their varied, brave and sometimes terrifying lives under Nazi rule. Alien occupation produces heightened responses both negative and positive. It divides some inhabitants as well as uniting others, breeds distrust and constant fear as well as kindness, courage, intense friendships and romance.
The final chapters cover the arrival of British forces on Jersey on May 9th 1945, a date celebrated in Jersey as Liberation Day. The author shows how impossible it was for the inhabitants to revert immediately to life before the Germans came, so traumatised and emotionally depleted were they by five years of occupation.
