Resistance

Within a month of the failed D-Day landings, half of Britain is occupied. The women in the Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence, the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community.

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