Madeleine Bunting

Madeleine Bunting was for many years a columnist for the Guardian, which she joined in 1990. Bunting read History at Cambridge and Politics at Harvard. She is the author of the non-fiction books The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule, 1940-45; Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling out Lives; The Plot: A Biography of My Father’s English Acre, which won the Portico Prize and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize; Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey, which was shortlisted the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year; and a novel Island Song. She lives in London with her family.

Coming soon - March 2020

Island Song

Madeleine Bunting

In 1940, Helene, young, naive, and recently married, waves goodbye to her husband, who has enlisted in the British army. Her home, Guernsey, is soon invaded by the Germans, leaving her exposed to the hardships of occupation. 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.

Written with emotional acuity and passionate intensity, Island Song speaks of the moral complexities of war-time allegiances, the psychological toll 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

Coming soon - March 2020

Island Song