There is a great and intimate joy in discovering books populated with characters who love reading as much as you do. "84 Charing Cross Road" gave that warm feeling. So did Anne Fadiman's "Ex Libris." And so does "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press, 288 pages, $22). Despite its cloyingly cute title, this is a delightful, readable light book about a topic that is not light at all -- the German occupation of Guernsey, Jersey and the other Channel Islands during World War II.

The main character, Juliet Ashton, is a writer who is casting about for an idea. She'd made a name for herself writing humorous columns in the English press to entertain Londoners during the war, but now the war is over and she wants something meatier.

As she ponders, she happens to get a letter from a stranger who lives on a farm on Guernsey. He'd bought a secondhand edition of Charles Lamb, saw her name on the flyleaf, and wrote her to ask if she could recommend a good biography.

"Charles Lamb made me laugh during the German Occupation, especially when he wrote about the roast pig," the farmer writes. "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came into being because of a roast pig."

Like any good writer, Juliet finds her curiosity piqued -- by a farmer reading Charles Lamb, by the fact of the German occupation, which had not been terribly well known, and, of course, by a book club that carries such an unusual and cumbersome name.

Told entirely through letters, "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" is a story of pluck and courage and survival, and about the way that books can bring people together. It has been quietly, mainly through word-of-mouth, been on best-seller lists for months.

The citizens of the Channel Islands (between France and England) suffered greatly during World War II. The Germans occupied their land for five years, without resistance from England.

Juliet eventually falls into correspondence with most members of the society, and through their letters the islanders describe, in plain words and without self-pity, what they endured. Not just the indignities of arbitrary curfews and rules; not just the near-starvation from turning over their crops and livestock to the Germans. But starker, grimmer details -- rape, forced prostitution and death.

The book's authors -- Shaffer, who died in February, was a bookseller and librarian, and she asked Barrows, her novelist niece, to be her co-author -- do not take the easy way out. As the story unfolds, you see some good Germans, and some bad Channel Islanders, and many of the complications that make up real life.

There's a requisite love story, to help keep things satisfying. But for me, the satisfaction came in the affirmation that there are still people out there who love books of all kinds, and the reminder that people who read are almost always good people to know.

Laurie Hertzel • 612-673-7302