Owen's debut novel, Resistance
is published in the UK by
Faber & Faber
in June 2007 and in the U.S. by Nan A. Talese in January 2008.
In the months afterwards all of the women, at some point, said they’d
known the men were leaving the valley…
1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German
counter-attack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is
occupied.
Sarah Lewis, a 26-year-old farmer’s wife, wakes to find her husband Tom has
disappeared. She is not alone. All the other women in the isolated Welsh border
valley of Olchon also wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and
unexplained absence the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and
wait, hoping for news.
A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery.
When a severe winter forces the two groups into co-operation, a fragile mutual
dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s
commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram. But as the pressure of the war beyond
presses in on them, the valley’s delicate state of harmony is increasingly
threatened, before being broken completely, with devastating consequences.
Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers’ debut novel
unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious
landscape of the border territories and a gripping portrait of a community under
siege, Resistance is a first novel of considerable grace and power.
'Owen Sheers’s powerful first novel dances brilliantly…a polyphonous novel filled to bursting with evocative images’ – The Telegraph
'Sheers treads his tricky path with infinite subtlety, sometimes leading us towards one conclusion, sometimes to another. Resistance is at once a brilliant and sometimes frightening thriller, and a mature exploration of human blur and compromise.'
Jan Morris, Guardian 2nd June 2007
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