The Postmistress
read the first chapter
What would happen if a postmistress chose not to deliver the mail?
It is 1940. While the war is raging in Europe, President Roosevelt
promises he won't send American boys over to fight.
Iris James is the postmistress of Franklin, Massachusetts a small
town at the end of Cape Cod. She firmly believes her job is to
deliver and keep people's secrets, to pass along the news of love
and sorrow that letters carry. Faithfully she stamps and sends the
letters between people such as the newlyweds Emma and Will Fitch,
who has gone to London to help out during the Blitz. But one day she
slips a letter into her pocket, and leaves it there.
Meanwhile, seemingly fearless radio gal, Frankie Bard is reporting
the Blitz from London, her dispatches crinkling across the Atlantic,
imploring listeners to pay attention. Then in the last desperate days
of the summer of 1941, she rides the trains out of Germany, reporting
on what is happening to the refugees there.
Alternating between an America on the eve of entering into World War
II, still safe and snug in its inability to grasp the danger at hand,
an a Europe being torn apart by war, the two stories collide in a
letter, bringing the war finally home to Franklin.
Advance praise for The Postmistress!
"Some novels we savor for their lapidary prose, others for
their flesh and blood characters, and still others for a sweeping
narrative arc that leaves us light-headed and changed; Sarah
Blake's masterful, THE POSTMISTRESS,
serves us all this and more. Compassionate, insightful, and
unsentimental, this masterful novel is told in a rare and
highly successful omniscient voice, one that delves deeply
into the seemingly random nature of love and war and story
itself. This is a superb book!" -- Andre Dubus III
“Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day until
you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again. THE
POSTMISTRESS is one of those rare books. When
I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about it. THE
POSTMISTRESS made me homesick for a time before
I was even born. A beautifully written, thought provoking
novel that I’m telling everyone I know to read.” — Kathryn
Stockett, author of The Help
“THE POSTMISTRESS is the fictional
communique readers have waited for. Sarah Blake has brought
small-town American life and ravaged Europe during WWII to
us with cinematic immediacy. The romantic, harrowing -- and
utterly inimitable-- story of radio journalist Frankie Bard
(appalled yet intoxicated by tragedy as no character I've
ever read before) contains the uncompromised sensibility found
in the writings of Martha Gellhorn. THE POSTMISTRESS
belongs in what Gellhorn called "the permanent
and necessary" library.” — Howard Norman, author of The
Bird Artist and Devotion
"An unforgettable, insightful, and compelling novel. Sarah
Blake's prose perfectly recreates the cadences of passion
and of the inner life while also conjuring up the wrenching,
nightmare suspense of history in the making." — Sena Jeter
Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and Abundance,
a Novel of Marie Antoinette
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