Speculative Fiction – BooksPlease

I decided to read Resistance by Owen Sheers for the Reading Wales Month 2025 hosted by Karen at BookerTalk. It’s another one of my TBRs, a paperback that I bought in 2008. It was first published in 2007 by Faber and Faber (349 pages). Resistance was his first novel.

Owen Sheers was brought up in Abergavenny. The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer’s Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book, was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year.

From Owen Sheer’s website:

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.

My thoughts:

I love historical fiction, but this is different – it is alternate history. Sheers speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if Germany had won the Second World War and invaded and occupied Great Britain, an alarming prospect. The plot centres on the inhabitants of the isolated Olchon valley in the Black Mountains of south-east Wales close to Hereford and the border between Wales and England. It’s set in 1944–45, shortly after the failure of Operation Overlord and a successful German counter-invasion of Great Britain.

I enjoyed it mainly for Sheers’ beautiful descriptions of the Welsh countryside, so vivid that I can easily imagine I was there, and the daily tasks of farming life, but this does make it slow reading. The main characters are Sarah, and the other women, Maggie, Mary, Menna and Bethan, living in the valley whose husbands had left, Albrecht, an English speaker and ex-Oxford scholar, who leads a German patrol ordered to establish an observation post in the valley, and George, a teenager, recruited by ‘Tommy Atkins’, a British Intelligence officer, to join the British Resistance movement observing the enemy troop movements.

This is a very visual book, and character driven with very little action until the second half of the book. After reading so much crime fiction and fast action novels I had to adapt my reading speed to appreciate this book and to fully enjoy it. It’s a book to read slowly absorbing the language and descriptions. I particularly liked the details about the Welsh poet, who told Sarah of the tales of King Arthur, Lancelot and Percival (knights of the Round Table) and about Welsh princes, Irish princesses and English armies. One of the stories was about a Welsh king and his army, beaten in the hills by Edward I. Beaten but not killed and not captured and never seen again.

Thousands of men swallowed within the muscles of the earth that formed Wales’ natural defences against her invaders. And they were still there. At this point the poet paused in his painting, placed his brush into a cloudy jar of water and leant closer to Sarah’s listening face. His voice dropped, so quiet she could barely hear him over the running of the streams. Yes, he’d whispered, still there in the hills, deep inside them, buried under the peat, heather, gorse, rowan, bog-cotton, stone and soil. Asleep. Not dead, asleep. An entire army and their king, ready to wake and defend the country in its hour of need. (pages 176 and 177)

Sarah wonders if that’s where their husbands have gone deep underground. She wanted to believe that it was so, that their husbands would be coming back to defend their country. This is a story I’ve come across before, but in England, a legend of a cavern beneath Alderley Edge in Cheshire, full of knights in armour awaiting a call to decide the fate of a great battle for England. There is no king named, but there is a wizard involved, who is referred to as Merlin in later versions of the legend.

Another part that struck a chord with me is when Albrecht took Sarah up into the hills, luring her through a crack in the rock in the cliff wall to a large cavity, where the Mappa Mundi was kept hidden from the SS. It’s a medieval map of the world – I’ve seen it in Hereford Cathedral. Scholars believe it was made around the year 1300 and shows the history, geography and destiny of humanity as it was understood in Christian Europe in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In his Afterword Owen Sheers states that the Mapp Mundi was removed from Hereford Cathedral and eventually kept in a coal mine in Bradford-upon-Avon.

There is much more in this book that I’ve not described – the relationship between the women and the Germans, particularly that between Sarah and Albrecht, who eventually realised what they had in common, a love of music and literature. I haven’t described how the wider community reacted to the invasion, and the suspicion and fear that they all experienced. And, having said that there is very little action in this book there is plenty of detail and thoughts about war, occupation, death and above all about Wales. The ending is particularly poignant.

Owen Sheers’ Afterwood explains where he got the idea to write an alternative history. He had first heard of the plans for a British resistance organisation when he was working for a builder in the Llanthony valley and the builder told him how during the war some farmers in the area were given caches of arms which they’d hidden in underground bunkers in the hills. Should the orders come they were to leave their homes and wives and take to the Black Mountains to resist the German army. Later on, in 2001 he heard a radio interview on the Today programme with George Vater, who had, as a young man, been recruited into the Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section comprising local people trained to spy on an occupying German force. Sheers knew George Vater and visiting him, George had shown him cuttings, maps and photographs and told how he had been approached by a man calling himself ‘Tommy Atkins’ who invited to join his Special Duties Section. So, whilst this is a work of fiction it is based on fact, woven into Sheers’ story and he writes that only the valley is real.

I enjoyed it far more than I expected and I’d love to read more of Owen Sheers’ work.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Books Set in Another Time (These can be historical, futuristic, alternate universes, or even in a world where you’re not sure when it takes place you just know it’s not right now.)

The difficulty I had with this post was choosing which books to feature out of so many possibilities. I decided to pick books that are set in the past and also in the future. I’ve listed them in chronological order.

The Past:

1.Imperium by Robert Harris, the first in his Cicero Trilogy, beginning in 79 BC, this book set in the Republican era is a fictional biography of Marcus Tullius Cicero by Tiro, his slave secretary.

Tiro was a real person who did write a biography of Cicero, which has since been lost in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Harris has based Imperium on, among other sources, Cicero’s letters, which Tiro had recorded, successfully interweaving Cicero’s own words with his own imagination. It is basically a political history, a story filled with intrigue, scheming and treachery in the search for political power as Cicero, a senator, works his way to power as one of Rome’s two consuls. I marked many passages that struck me as interesting and felt much of the struggle for power applies as much today as it did in Ancient Rome.

2. The Man on a Donkey by H,M, F. Prescott – set in 1536 -1537 (covering the same period as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy)

An enthralling novel about a moment in history when England’s Catholic heritage was scattered to the four winds by a powerful and arrogant king. In 1536, Henry VIII was almost toppled when Northern England rose to oppose the Dissolution of the Monasteries. For a few weeks Robert Aske, the leader of the rebels, held the fate of the entire nation in his hand. It’s written in the form of a chronicle, written from the various characters’ viewpoints telling the story of the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Pilgrimage of Grace was not a revolution against Henry but an attempt to get him to change his mind and to understand how people felt. They wanted Henry to stop the dissolution and his attacks on the monks and nuns and to return the country to following the Pope.

Just like Mantel’s books, this book transported me back to that time, with lyrical descriptions of the settings, both of the countryside and of the towns, of Marrick Priory and of the king’s court, of the people, and the mood of the times, both religious and political.

3. The Potter’s Hand by by A N Wilson – beginning in 1768 and roughly following the fortunes of the Wedgwood family until 1805, ten years after the death of Josiah Wedgwood, an English potter and the founder of the Wedgwood company.

For me it really did convey what it must have been like to live in that period – whilst the the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, were taking place. It was a time of great change (what time isn’t?) both social and political change as the industrial revolution got under way in England. It’s full of ideas about colonialism, the abolition of slavery, working conditions, and women’s rights. It brought about small changes as well as big ones.

It’s big on character (lots of them), the main ones being Josiah Wedgwood himself, ‘Owd Wooden Leg‘, his daughter Sukey, his nephew Tom Byerley, his childhood friend Caleb Bowers and Blue Squirrel, an American Cherokee Tom fell in love with in America. Overall it is the story of a remarkable family, their lives, loves, work, illnesses, depressions, addictions and deaths.

4. Mrs Whistler by Matthew Plampin – 1876 to 1880

I loved this novel about the American artist James McNeill Whistler and his model and mistress, Maud Franklin, the ‘Mrs Whistler‘ of the title. The book covers two episodes in their lives during the years 1876 to 1880 – a bitter feud with his patron Francis Leyland about his fee for painting The Peacock Room, and the libel trial in which Whistler sued the art critic John Ruskin, over a review that dismissed him as a fraud. These two events brought Whistler to the point of bankruptcy.

It’s a long book that moves quite slowly through these four years. I loved all the detail – of Whistler’s impetuous and rebellious character, his relationship with his brother and mother (the real Mrs Whistler), as well as with Maud – and the details of the house he had built in London on Tite Street in Chelsea, which he called the White House, his flight to Venice and most of all about his paintings.

5. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley – Victorian times, a mixture of historical fact and fantasy

This is set both in London and Japan, following the lives of the main characters, Thaniel Stapleton, Keita Mori and Grace Carrow. I was completely convinced by the setting in a different time in a world that was familiar and yet so different.

Keita Mori is an interesting character and as I read my opinion of him kept changing – just who is he? He is an enigma, why is he living in London, is he the bomb maker, does he in fact know what is going to happen, is he a magician? He baffled and confused me as much as he baffled and confused the other characters.

Equally fascinating are the sections set in Japan; Grace’s story, her research into luminiferous ether (a bit hard to follow), her relationship with Akira Matsumoto, the elegant son of a Japanese nobleman; the Japanese show village in Hyde Park where Gilbert and Sullivan went to research for the Mikado; the early days of the London Underground; and of course the clockwork inventions, in particular Katsu, the clockwork octopus.

6. The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson – 1914

This is really a book of two parts – the months before the outbreak of the First World War and then the events as the war got underway. It’s set in the summer of 1914, in Rye in East Sussex when spinster Beatrice Nash arrives to teach Latin at the local grammar school. It begins slowly with the first part describing the lazy, idyllic summer and in which all the characters are introduced. Although there is a clear distinction between the classes in society cracks are beginning to appear which will only widen as the century gets under way and the war acts as a catalyst for change.

Simonson doesn’t hold back on the horrific conditions under which the war took place and from a gentle beginning the book moves into a war novel, emotional and moving.

7. Corpus by Roy Clements – 1936

Set in 1936, a time when Europe was once more on the brink of war. Civil war has broken out in Spain, in Britain some people are openly supporting the Nazis in Germany and politicians are torn between wanting Edward VIII to abdicate the throne or give up his relationship with Wallis Simpson.

When a renowned member of the county set and his wife are found horribly murdered, Tom Wilde a history professor, finds himself dragged into a world of espionage which, until now, he has only read about in books. But the deeper he delves, the more he wonders whether the murders are linked to the death of the girl with the silver syringe – and, just as worryingly, to the scandal surrounding King Edward VIII and his mistress Wallis Simpson…

The Future:

8. The Passengers by John Marrs – the near future

This is a shocking book. I found it riveting, even if it is preposterous, and sinister with a frightening view of the future that may not be that ridiculous. It kept me glued to the page right to the end. Driverless cars have been developed to Level Five, with no steering wheels, pedals or a manual override option. A Hacker has taken over control of the cars, set them on a collision course, and tells each passenger that the destination they programmed into their GPS has been replaced with an alternative location. In approximately two hours time they are going to die. They are trapped inside unable to contact the outside world.

9.The Library of the Dead by T L Huchu, the first book in the Edinburgh Nights series, set in a future or alternative Edinburgh

It’s urban fantasy, with a wealth of dark secrets in its underground. Teenager Ropa, has dropped out of school to become a ghost talker and when a child goes missing in Edinburgh’s darkest streets, Ropa investigates his disappearance. Now she speaks to Edinburgh’s dead, carrying messages to those they left behind. A girl’s gotta earn a living, and it seems harmless enough. Until, that is, the dead whisper that someone’s bewitching children – leaving them husks, empty of joy and strength. It’s on Ropa’s patch, so she feels honor-bound to investigate. But what she learns will rock her world.

10. The Uncertain Midnight by Edmund Cooper – set on Earth in 2113

Earth is a world run by machines, androids, who have taken over the burdens of work and responsibility, a world where the humans are required to spend their lives in leisure pursuits, but are subject to ‘Analysis’ (brain-washing) if the androids think they are maladjusted.

John Markham emerges in 2113 after spending 146 years in suspended animation, frozen deep under ground after an atomic holocaust had devastated his world. In 2113 not all humans were happy to leave everything to the androids. Known as Runners these humans believed in ‘human dignity, freedom of action and the right to work’. Markham struggles to adapt and this raises the question of whether the androids could be said to be alive – leading to discussions about the definition of life, the difference between determinism and free will, and eventually leading to war between the androids and the Runners.