Resistance : a novel
/ Owen Sheers
- 1st ed
- New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday , c2007.
- 506 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Poet Sheers takes readers to a small Welsh village during a speculative WWII featuring a German invasion of Britain. It's 1944 and Sarah Lewis and the women in Ochlon valley are left alone after all the local men disappear one night. The women's worlds suddenly shrink to the day-to-day struggles to keep their sheep farms going until the war comes to their doorsteps in the form of Capt. Albrecht Wolfram and his men, who have a murky mission to carry out in the valley. Promising to leave the women alone, the Germans occupy an abandoned house and the two camps keep mostly to themselves until a harsh winter takes hold, and it becomes clear that the locals and the Germans will have to depend on one another to survive. It's also revealed that Albrecht is just as interested as the locals are in staying away from the war for as long as possible, and the two communities begin to merge. But when the weather breaks and the valley reopens to the world and hence the war the peculiar idyll threatens to shatter.