The Many Seas to Guernsey: a sweeping historical novel about faith and conscience – and the cost of choosing love in a world on the brink of catastrophe. From Catherine Taylor, author of no. 1 best seller Beyond The Moon.

 

​In 1936 Kitty Garland-Fry arrives on 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 her family and 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.

 

When Kitty and Lukas meet my chance, their shared loneliness draws them together. Bonding over poetry and books, their days on beautiful Guernsey unfold like a quiet, sunlit dream, sheltered from both the pull of duty and gathering storm of war. Then friendship begins to deepen into something more, at the very moment when history intrudes, demanding they choose who, and what, they truly believe in – and what they are willing to lose.

 

The Many Seas to Guernsey is an emotional, meticulously researched and character-driven epic exploring the moral cost of belief, the fragility of refuge, and the redemptive – and dangerous – power of love in a time of political and spiritual crisis. Charting the road to war from both the British and German perspectives, it confronts the still-controversial accommodation of the German Catholic Church with the Nazi regime, alongside the courage of a small number of men and women who refused to comply.

 

The story moves from the secluded white sand coves of Guernsey to the 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 All the Light We Cannot See, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Nightingale, The Book Thief and Atonement.

 

Catherine Taylor is a former journalist, she was born and brought up on Guernsey, then went on to study German history and language, giving rise to a lifelong passion for twentieth century history. She lives in West London with her husband, two children and five cats.