The Many Seas to Guernsey

*Starred review: "An engrossing saga of love set against a subtly drawn, disturbing depiction of Hitler's tyranny... Taylor's sprawling narrative is a coming-of-age story with the highest possible stakes, a tense wartime thriller, a study of faith in extremis... and an unusually intimate portrait of life in Germany as Nazism corrupts friendships and families" - Kirkus




"An immersive tale of enduring love between a British woman and a German Catholic seminarian on the eve of WWII... WWII fiction fans will be riveted" - Publishers Weekly




In the last golden years before Europe erupts into
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 and devastating, morally complex love story that will stay with you long
after the last page, 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 boredom and 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 for a year to take his newly widowed English-born mother back
home to safety. Fiercely anti-Nazi, he can't help feeling that he's abandoning
both his country and his calling at a moment of gathering darkness.




Two fish out of water together, Kitty and Lukas are
drawn together in their shared loneliness. Bonding over poetry and books, their
days unfold like a quiet, sunlit dream on white sand beaches beneath endless
blue skies, sheltered from both the pull of responsibility and the gathering
storm of war. But 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 forces Kitty onto a new path that will take her into the very
heart of Nazi Germany. As the world fractures around them and Lukas witnesses
the shameful, real-life historical collusion of the Church he loves with
Nazism, he's forced to reevaluate all he once believed sacred, while at the
same time Kitty, trying to fashion a future for herself built on compromise and
hope, discovers that conscience will not be silenced. And as the consequences
of their choices finally come due, both Kitty and Lukas must decide who, and
what, they truly believe in - and what they are willing to lose.




Charting the road to war from both the British and
German perspectives, The Many Seas to Guernsey is an emotional,
character-driven epic that grapples with themes of faith, conscience, moral
courage and the power of love in an age of extremes. Moving from the secluded
turquoise coves of Guernsey to the towering Bavarian Alps, then to the Gestapo
cells of pre-war Berlin and finally the hellish beaches of the 1940 Dunkirk
evacuation. The Many Seas to Guernsey is the first in a planned duology and
will appeal to fans of novels like All the Light We Cannot See, Crooked Cross, Suite Francaise and The Nightingale.