Resistance

Resistance is a beautifully written and powerful story set during an imagined occupation of Britain by Nazi Germany in World War II.

In a remote and rugged Welsh valley in 1944, in the wake of a German invasion, all the men have disappeared overnight, apparently to join the underground resistance. Their abandoned wives, a tiny group of farm women, are soon trapped in the valley by an unusually harsh winter—along with a handful of war-weary German soldiers on a secret mission. The need to survive drives the soldiers and the women into uneasy relationships that test both their personal and national loyalties. But when the snow finally melts, bringing them back into contact with the war that has been raging beyond their mountains, they must face the dramatic consequences of their choices.

Owen Sheers, born in Fiji in 1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales, was the 1999 winner of both an Eric Gregory Award and the Vogue Young Writer’s Award. His first collection of poetry, The Blue Book, was short-listed for the Wales Book of the Year and the 2001 Forward Poetry Prize. His debut prose, The Dust Diaries, a nonfiction narrative set in Zimbabwe, was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and won the 2005 Wales Book of the Year. In 2004 he was writer in residence at the Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s 20 Next Generation Poets. His second collection, Skirrid Hill, won a Society of Authors’ Somerset Maugham Award. Sheers is currently a Fellow of the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Resistance is his first novel, and he is working on a second. His website is www.owensheers.co.uk