Sarah Blake
publisher
Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam
format
Hardcover
pages
336
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
THE POSTMISTRESS by Sarah Blake takes place in 1940. France has fallen; bombs are dropping on London, and President Roosevelt is promising not to send our boys to fight in "foreign wars." But American radio girl Frankie Bard, the first woman to report from the Blitz in London, wants nothing more than to bring the war home. Frankie's radio dispatches crackle across the Atlantic Ocean, imploring listeners to pay attention: the Nazis bomb London nightly and Jewish refugees stream across Europe. Frankie is convinced that if she can just get the story, it will wake Americans to action and they will join in the fight.
Meanwhile, in Franklin, Mass., a small town on Cape Cod, Iris James hears Frankie's broadcasts and knows that it is only a matter of time before the war arrives on Franklin's shores. In charge of the town's mail, Iris believes that it is her job to deliver and keep people's secrets, passing along the news that letters carry.
Alternating between an America still cocooned in its inability to grasp the danger at hand and a Europe being torn apart by war, THE POSTMISTRESS gives us two women who find themselves unable to deliver the news , and a third woman desperately waiting for news yet afraid to hear it.
Blake's THE POSTMISTRESS shows its readers how war goes on around us while ordinary lives continue. Filled with stunning parallels to today, this is a remarkable novel.
Sarah Blake taught high school and college English for many years in Colorado and New York. She has taught fiction workshops at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA, The Writer's Center, in Bethesda MD, The University of Maryland, and The George Washington University. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, the poet Joshua Weiner, and their two sons.
Beyond the book
Sarah Blake speaks about The Postmistress, click here
From Publishers Weekly
Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husband—a volunteer doctor stationed in England—James comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worlds—a naïve nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terror—with a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime. (Feb.)