Elizabeth is Missing [suggested by Noel Fagan]
‘Elizabeth is missing’, reads the note in Maud’s pocket in her own handwriting.
Lately, Maud’s been getting forgetful. She keeps buying peach slices when she has a cupboard full, forgets to drink the cups of tea she’s made and writes notes to remind herself of things. But Maud is determined to discover what has happened to her friend, Elizabeth, and what it has to do with the unsolved disappearance of her sister Sukey, years back, just after the war. [Product description from Amazon]
The book has a dedicated page on the author’s website.
About the Author
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
Shortlisted for this month
This month Noel’s other two suggestions (based on a theme of “mystery novels”) were:
Clay
With fascination, Davie and his friend Geordie watch the arrival of a new boy, Stephen Rose, in their town. He seems to have come from nowhere, and when he arrives to live with his distant aunt, the local Crazy Mary, no one envies his new home. But perhaps he’s the answer to Davie and Geordie’s prayers – a secret weapon in their war against monstrous Mouldy and his gang.
Intrigued, Davie and Geordie befriend Stephen. But they are heading innocently down a path that brings with it a monster of an entirely unexpected nature. Their encounter with the mysterious Stephen is as incredible as it is menacing, and as the true story of Stephen’s past slowly emerges, Davie’s life is changed for ever… [Product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page.
About the Author
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website (undergoing “a facelift” at the time of writing).
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
The novel is set in 1946 and is in the form of letters, mainly to and from the central character, Juliet Ashton, a successful writer who becomes, wholly coincidentally, involved with a group of people on Guernsey who lived through the wartime German Occupation. The characters are thoroughly engaging and Mary Ann Shaffer (although born in the USA) manages to capture the English voice of the time beautifully: the prose is a pleasure to read.
It is very hard to summarise any of the developing stories without giving away more than I’d have wanted to know in advance, so I won’t try, but the book has something to say about all kinds of things. Among them are friendship, suffering, forgiveness, goodness and wickedness, the resilience of humanity in desperate circumstances, how reading may influence us and the history of the Channel Islanders during the war. All this makes it sound a bit worthy and turgid, but it’s neither – anything but, in fact. I never felt that I was being lectured, the history forms a really interesting and beautifully evoked backdrop to a thoroughly involving story and the observations on other things are either implicit in the doings of characters I really cared about or made directly with wit and flair. And there’s a really tense will-they-won’t-they love story which Jane Austen would have been proud of and which kept me in nail-biting suspense right up to the last page. [abridged from an “Amazon Vine” review]
The novel has many online reviews (Google them for yourselves) but no dedicated page, or Wikipedia entry.
About the Author
Mary Ann Shaffer was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1934. Her career included libraries, bookstores, and publishing, but her life-long dream was to “write a book that someone would like enough to publish.” Though she did not live to see it, this dream has been realized in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
She became interested in Guernsey while visiting London in 1980. On a whim, she decided to fly to Guernsey but became stranded there when a thick fog descended and all boats and planes were forbidden to leave the island. As she waited for the fog to lift, warming herself by the heat of the hand-dryer in the men’s restroom, she read all the books in the Guernsey airport bookstore, including Jersey under the Jack-Boot. Thus began her fascination with the German Occupation of the Channel Islands.
Many years later, when goaded by her book club to write a novel, Mary Ann naturally thought of Guernsey. She chose to write in the epistolary form because, “for some bizarre reason, I thought it would be easier.” Several years of work yielded The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which was greeted with avid enthusiasm, first by her family, then by her writing group, and finally by publishers around the world.
Sadly, Mary Ann’s health began to decline shortly thereafter, and she asked her niece, Annie Barrows (author of the Ivy and Bean series for children, as well as The Magic Half), to help her finish the book. Mary Ann died in February 2008, knowing that her novel was to be published in English and in translation in many languages throughout the world. [from bookbrowse.com]
There is (as yet) no dedicated Wikipedia page, or website, although her niece (who finished the book on her behalf) does have one.