The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

★★★

"How Iris and Frankie come to betray everything they stand for-that mail must be delivered, that news must be told-is that war story I hoped to tell.  It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the newspaper account.  It's about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can't bear: that we are alive of instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refuges are cramped into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day.  And what, in the end, do we do?"