The Diane Rehm Show featured this unique epistolary novel with some terrific on-air guests on Aug 24, 2011.

If the novel kindled your curiosity about life on the channel islands during the occupation, then you'll want to hear the call-in portion of the show for sure. Listeners called in with their own families' stories of the occupation, of child relatives being evacuated to the mainland as occupation orphans, of those who stayed on the islands, and of the 2,000 channel islanders who were sent away to Nazi concentration camps. There was one miraculous story of a pair of brothers who returned to the islands from the camps after the war.

If you've not yet read the novel, I recommend the audio version, especially for those who are not terribly comfortable reading an epistolary novel -the voice acting is well done and helps bring the characters to life in a way that may be harder for silent readers of the written word to imagine.

Inspite of its seemingly light title, this is a book about the deepest of human circumstances -of occupation and resistance, of occupation and fear, and of community: It explores what it means to identify with a group and a place so much that you'd risk your life for its way of life or turn your life upside down once it claims you as its own.