Very interesting nominations, Bookworm_Girl. We are on the same wavelength with the British Isles, as I've been mulling over which book from Wales to nominate. I'd narrowed the author down to Owen Sheers, who is a poet, author and playwright (and has won awards in all three areas), but hadn't been able to decide between two of his books. The one that first stood out to me was The Dust Diaries which won the award for the Wales Book of the Year. It's mostly non-fiction with some fictional elements, but what is so grand about it for this month is that it has a Welsh author who was born in Fiji writing about a sojourn to Zimbabwe, so it touches three of the five regions in play. Sheers finds out from a book about a great uncle who was a lyric poet and unorthodox missionary to Rhodesia for about 50 years until death and who was a colourful character and lived an extraordinary life, and so Sheers decides to travel there himself to better understand his ancestor as well as the country and people. The fictional elements are when he imagines scenes from his great uncle's life. However, this book isn't available in ebook, harumph.
I've been tempted enough to nominate it anyway to think it over for a few days now (and if anyone else wants to nominate it I'll vote for it!), but in the end I'm going to go for the other book, Resistance, which does have an ebook. It also sounds very interesting and is purely a novel. It's historical fiction, although the differentiating aspect of it is that it's alternative fiction. Honestly I'm not sure if I've ever read an alternative fiction book myself before, but I think the author has enough of a literary pedigree for it to fit the club and it sounds like it would make for an interesting discussion. 328 pages; from
Goodreads:
Quote:
Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers's debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege.
1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German counterattack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied. The seat of British government has fled to Worcester, Churchill to Canada. A network of British resistance cells is all that is left to defy the German army.
Against this backdrop, Resistance opens with Sarah Lewis, a twenty-six-year-old farmer's wife, waking to find her husband, Tom, has disappeared. She is not alone, as all the other 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 and wait, hoping for news.
Later, a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups together, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of the patrol. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened.
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