Janis Spehr
Danger. Imprisonment. Death. This is the fate in store for anyone who dares defy the German authorities during their occupation on the island of Jersey during World War II. Undeterred, Lucy Schwob (’Claude’) and Suzanne Malherbe (’Marcel’) embark upon a campaign of rebellion. By day, the two women present to the world as quiet, cat-loving sisters; in reality they are lovers and saboteurs, using surrealist-inspired artworks to undermine and destabilise a tyrannous regime’s power in an environment where no one is to be trusted. Captured in 1944 and faced with the threat of execution or deportation to a concentration camp, Lucy and Suzanne must draw on all their reserves of courage, imagination and tenacity, as well as their deep love, to survive separation, starvation and their own faltering will to live. Bowed but never broken completely, they greet freedom with ambivalence, knowing the price which has been paid for it by so many. Set against a backdrop of surveillance and fear, told in gleaming evocative prose which brings the ever-changing oceanic landscape to life, Claude & Marcel is a story of bittersweet triumph by twinned spirits, the shadow to her light, the electron which dances with her proton, the one seed of a dicotyledon which nestles next to the other.
