The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is set in 1946 and opens in January, as Juliet Ashton, a thirty-two-year-old writer, tours England to promote a collection of the comic columns she wrote about life during the war under the pen name Izzy Bickerstaff. She has told her publisher that she wants to put the character aside and write under her own name. Then a letter arrives from a man on the island of Guernsey who has found her name written inside a second-hand book, and who belongs to the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a reading group that began as an alibi when its members were caught out after curfew during the German occupation of the island.

The novel is epistolary, made up of letters, telegrams and diary entries rather than continuous narration, and Juliet's correspondence with the islanders is interleaved with her exchanges with her publisher and best friend, Sidney Stark, and with the attentions of a wealthy American, Markham V. Reynolds, who sends flowers to her appearances. Through the letters Juliet gets to know the members of the society and what the occupation did to the island, and the book's account of the war years is assembled out of what people are willing to write down.

The novel was published in 2008 and was written by Mary Ann Shaffer with her niece Annie Barrows. It was adapted into a film released in 2018, with Lily James as Juliet Ashton and Matthew Goode as Sidney Stark.