Island Song

By: Madeleine Bunting

Narrated by: Billie Fulford-Brown

A spellbinding story of forbidden love and family secrets on German-occupied Guernsey.

1940. Guernsey is first bombed, then occupied, by the Germans. A year earlier, young, naive and recently married Helene waves good-bye to her husband, who has enlisted in the British army. Protected only by her father and Nanna, Helene must carve out a life on the island for the length of the war. Forty years later, her daughter Roz begins a search for the truth about her father and stumbles into the secret history of her mother's life.

Island Song speaks of the moral complexities of living with the enemy and the messy reality of human relationships in a tightly knit community. As Roz discovers, truth is hard to pin down, and so are the rights and wrongs of those struggling to survive in the most difficult of circumstances.

Madeleine Bunting is the author of several works of nonfiction including The Model Occupation, the Channel Islands Under German Rule. A former Guardian columnist, this is her first novel.

©2019 Madeleine Bunting (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd

Interesting story spoiled by bad accents

The problem with this title mainly is in the Audio. Billie Fulford-Brown is too young a voice for most of the characters, and her accents are terrible: her “French”, “Russian” and “German” all sound the same, and either the recording is glitchy or she keeps fluffing lines and the mistakes aren’t edited out, either way, when you purchase a title you expect consistent quality. The story is interesting but can come off a little like a history lesson shoe-horned into literary devices such as dialogue, letters etc, and often doesn’t feel authentic.