- 31 May -30 June 2024
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- Fiction
Madeleine Bunting
Madeleine Bunting, best-selling author of many works of non-fiction including The Plot and Love of Country, shares the challenges of writing her first novel: Set on Guernsey, Island Song tells the gripping story of a woman searching to uncover the secret of her mother’s past and the truth about her birth during the Nazi occupation.
Island Song is a spelllbinding story of forbidden love and family secrets on German-occupied Guernsey. To be published by Granta in April 2019
In 1940, Helene, young, naive and recently married, waves goodbye to her husband, who has enlisted in the British army. Her home, Guernsey, is soon invaded by the Germans, leaving her exposed to the hardships of occupation. Forty years, later, her daughter Roz begins a search for the truth about her father, and stumbles into the secret history of her mother’s life.
Written with emotional acuity and passionate intensity, Island Song speaks of the moral complexities of wartime allegiances, the psychological toll of living with the enemy and the messy reality of human relationships in a tightly knit community. As Roz discovers, truth is hard to pin down, and so are the rights and wrongs of those struggling to survive in the most difficult of circumstances.
This is Madeleine Bunting’s first novel and draws extensively from the ground breaking non fiction title, The Model Occupation, which was published in 1995.
