(Penguin, $39)
There’s a lot of historical fiction around these days and usually what strikes me when I read it is that no matter what the century, people ultimately have the same problems: who to love, who to trust, who to chop into a hundred tiny pieces and bury under the floorboards.
With Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress, however, it isn’t so much identifying with the characters that makes it such a gripping read – it’s considering their predicaments made all the more extraordinary by the particularly explosive times.
It’s 1940 in the tiny Cape Cod town of Franklin and most folk think WWII is nothing more than an itch on someone else’s butt. Not so, Iris James, the postmistress of the title, although as she herself points out, there’s no such thing as “postmistress” so she is actually the postmaster. Iris can see the writing on the wall. The draft has begun, after all, so letters are starting to arrive calling local boys up for the army, no matter what the President has promised.
It might be all sunshine and plain sailing in Cape Cod but across the Atlantic, London is being bombed to smithereens as reported by ballsy American journalist Frankie Bard. Frankie is seeing wives lose husbands, sons lose mothers, reporters lose friends and it’s killing her that no one back home seems to give a damn.
Iris does though. She listens to Frankie’s heart-felt accounts on the radio, and so does Emma, Dr Fitch’s new wife. Emma is haunted by what she hears, which makes it even harder to let go when her husband decides to travel voluntarily right into the bleak burnt-out heart of the war for reasons that have nothing to do with Hitler.
What lingers in the mind long after the pages of this book have been turned is that the characters ultimately still face the same problems that we do today, but the difference is that in war-time, everything is a matter of life and death. Even letters. or especially letters.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
