Lecture, Sarah Blake, The Postmistress

The Postmistress

Sarah Blake is the author of a chapbook of poems, Full Turn, an artist book, Runaway Girls—in collaboration with the artist Robin Kahn—and Grange House, which was named a “New and Noteworthy” paperback in 2001 by the New York Times. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Good Housekeeping, US News and World Reports, and The Chicago Tribune.

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.”

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