THE POSTMISTRESS by Sarah Blake

In l940, Iris James is the postmistress in coastal Franklin, Massachusetts. Iris knows more about the townspeople than she ever will say, for example that Emma Trask has come to marry the town's doctor, and that Harry Vale watches the ocean for U-boats. Iris believes that it is her job to deliver secrets. Yet, one day, she does the unthinkable: slips a letter into her pocket, reads it and doesn't deliver it.

Meanwhile, Frankie Bard broadcasts from overseas with Edward R. Murrow. Her dispatches beg listeners to pay heed as the Nazis bomb London nightly. Most of the townspeople of Franklin think that war can't touch them. But, Iris, Emma and Frankie know better.........

The Postmistress is a tale of two worlds, one shattered by violence, the other willfully naive and of two women whose jobs are to deliver the news, yet who find themselves unable to do so. Through their eyes and the eyes of everyday people caught in history's tide, it examines how we tell each other stories and how we bear the fact of war as we live ordinary lives.