Title: Resistance
Author: Owen Sheers
Year of publication: 2007
Genre: Literary alternate history
My rating: 4 stars or B

Just days after news of the invasion came crackling through on Maggie’s wireless…the men, lit by a hunter’s moon, met at William’s milking shed and slipped out of the valley. Moving in single file they walked through the higher fields and up over Hatterall ridge; an ellipsis of seven dark shapes decreasing over the hill’s shoulder, shortening to a last full stop and then nothing, just the blank page of the empty slope.”

Resistance is set in a 1944 where the D-Day landings have failed and the German have invaded Britain. A young woman in a remote Welsh border valley, Sarah, wakes to find her husband gone. She soon discovers that all seven of the men in the valley have disappeared, leaving their wives and children behind, with circumstantial evidence to suggest they’ve become resistance agents (as per real plans laid in 1940). When a small German patrol appears on a mysterious mission and becomes (deliberately) trapped in the valley for winter, the women must come to an accommodation with the enemy to keep their farms running and their sheep alive through the harsh weather.

I admit to a certain impatience with this book for the first third Read the rest of this entry »