Reunion offers a novel excuse to wine and dine

WE had our first village book club in a member’s sitting room since the onset of Covid.

It was a depleted gathering, only seven of us, all double-jabbed, and most triply. More of a jabboree than a jamboree.

We met in Peter and Anne’s farmhouse, an imaginatively-converted chicken shed in a cleft in the hills.

They live the Good Life, with hens and polytunnels, though he’s a full-time joiner.

The book under discussion was The

Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows, a saga of wartime occupation in the Channel Islands.

It’s an epistolatory novel, of letters from one character to another, but chiefly from the heroine, writer Juliet Ashton to her publisher and the islanders. Published in 2008, after the death of American Shaffer, it was a best-seller here and in the US, and made into a film three years ago.

It’s not often all we book-lovers agree, but this novel was drowned in praise for its fascinating range of characters and portrayal of life under the Nazis.

And we agreed the book was better than the film, at least I think we did because the Co-op Fair Trade Chenin

Blanc was taking its toll. Our meetings are sometimes more like a wine appreciation society that reads books than a book club that appreciates wine.

Apparently, some people have dry book clubs, which strikes me as pretty joyless pastime.

You don’t drink while reading, but you do when rabbitting on in good company in front of a blazing log-burner, full to bursting with a second helping of Anne’s magnificent meat and tatey pie.