A forbidden love between a German Roman Catholic seminarian and an English writer on the eve of WW2.
In the last years before 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, morally complex love story 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 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 to take his newly widowed English-born mother home to safety. Fiercely anti-Nazi, he can’t help feeling he’s abandoning both his country and his calling at a moment of gathering darkness.
Kitty and Lukas are drawn together in their shared loneliness. Bonding over poetry and books, their days unfold like a sunlit dream on white sand beaches beneath endless blue skies, sheltered from the gathering storm of war. 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 compels Kitty onto a path that will take her into the very heart of Nazi Germany.
Charting the road to war from both the British and German perspectives, The Many Seas to Guernsey is an emotional, character-driven epic grappling with themes of faith, conscience and the power of love in an age of extremes. Moving from the turquoise coves of Guernsey to the Bavarian Alps, then the Gestapo cells of Berlin and finally the hellish beaches of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation, TMSTG will appeal to fans of All the Light We Cannot See, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Nightingale and The Bronze Horseman.
"An engrossing saga of love set against a subtly drawn, disturbing depiction of Hitler’s tyranny."
- Kirkus Reviews
"An immersive tale of enduring love between a British woman and a German Catholic seminarian on the eve of war… WWII fiction fans will be riveted."
- Publishers Weekly
