Catherine Taylor The Many Seas to Guernsey

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 , shortlisted for the Orion/eHarmony love story prize. 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 into a devastating choice between God and the woman he loves, while fate also forces Kitty onto a new path that will take her into the very heart of Nazi Germany. As the world fractures around them and Lukas witnesses the shameful, real-life historical collusion of the Church he loves with Nazism, he's forced to reevaluate all he once believed sacred, while at the same time Kitty, trying to fashion a future for herself built on compromise and hope, discovers that conscience will not be silenced. And as the consequences of their choices finally come due, both Kitty and Lukas must decide who, and what, they truly believe in - and what they are willing to lose. Charting the road to war from both the British and German perspectives, The Many Seas to Guernsey is an emotional, character-driven epic that grapples with themes of faith, conscience, moral courage and the power of love in an age of extremes. Moving from the secluded turquoise coves of Guernsey to the towering Bavarian Alps, then to 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 Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society , The Nightingale , The Bronze Horseman , The Book Thief and Atonement . **NB This story unfolds against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. It contains depictions of violence, imprisonment, war crimes, sexual abuse and themes of loss and grief that some readers may find distressing.