Did Fielding not put the epistolary novel to the sword in the first half of the eighteenth century? OK, it's probably unfair to blame Shaffer's chosen form - writers like Byatt have made great use of it. The truth is that "The Guernsey blah blah blah" simply isn't a book for a reader like me. Sicklier than molasses, more hackneyed than Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts feel-gooders, plotted with all the finesse of a six year old with aspirations to architecture and a pack of crayons to hand, perhaps this novel's most laudable property, given that I read it over Christmas, is as an efficacious emetic to yuletide excess.