THE MANY SEAS TO GUERNSEY

Nazism and the Catholic Church’s requirement of priestly celibacy thwart a star-crossed couple in this sweeping wartime romance.

Taylor’s novel opens in 1936 on the English Channel island of Guernsey, where 16-year-old Kitty Garland-Fry likes the idyllic surroundings but is embarrassed by her bohemian family. (Her father, a famous painter, moves his mistress and illegitimate daughter to live with the family; Kitty’s mother dismisses her objections as “bourgeois and small-minded.”) Lukas von Harnitz, a gorgeous, poetic young German, arrives to visit English relatives, and he and Kitty fall in love, but his determination to become a Catholic priest seems an insuperable obstacle, and he returns to his Berlin seminary. Lukas’ visiting cousin Caspar, a handsome but cold Wehrmacht officer, is smitten with Kitty and invites her back to his Bavarian castle, where she has sex with him—mostly because she can’t have sex with Lukas. Pregnancy ensues, and Kitty reluctantly weds Caspar and endures his creepy affection, terrible lovemaking, and boorish pro-Nazi relatives. (Typical dinner-party repartee: “We’re the superior race now, and like all such races we’re proving ourselves through war and domination, fulfilling our destiny according to the Führer’s vision.”) After she miscarries, Kitty and Lukas reconnect to help Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime and begin a passionate affair after Lukas, disgusted with the Church’s compromises with the Nazis, abandons his priestly vocation. In 1939, Lukas is arrested for espionage and thrown into the Gestapo’s torture chambers, while Kitty flees Germany as World War II breaks out. Sentenced to a Wehrmacht penal battalion, Lukas wanders through war-torn Europe hoping to someday reunite with Kitty, while back in Guernsey, Kitty wonders if the child she’s carrying is Caspar’s or Lukas’.

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 when churches crumble and prayers go unanswered, and an unusually intimate portrait of life in Germany as Nazism corrupts friendships and families. It’s also a vivid anatomy of a toxic marriage as Kitty and Caspar’s relationship moves from awkward anti-chemistry to an agonizing marital trap. Taylor’s writing conveys her characters’ delicate shades of feeling with clarity and nuance, but she’s just as skillful in depicting their harrowing physical ordeals. Lukas endures shocking torments (“there was a sudden explosion of unimaginable pain, as if a butcher’s cleaver were hacking his entire body apart, bones and all”), and Taylor sketches one of the great literary evocations of childbirth: “Her bones felt hollowed out, bleached and brittle, like those that washed up at the cove with the tide,” she writes of Kitty’s labor. “The pain got even worse, leaving her unable to speak…And, somehow, she did bear it, because there was no choice but to bear it.” Taylor beats the hell out of her flawed and very human characters—and thus makes their responses to some of history’s most desperate circumstances all the more convincing.

An engrossing saga of love set against a subtly drawn, disturbing depiction of Hitler’s tyranny.