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Summary
Summary
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.
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, Resistance is a first novel of grace and power.
Author Notes
OWEN SHEERS is the author of The Dust Diaries , two volumes of poetry, and several works for the stage, radio, and television. He grew up in Wales and now lives in London.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet Sheers takes readers to a small Welsh village during a speculative WWII-featuring a German invasion of Britain-in his auspicious debut novel. It's 1944 and Sarah Lewis and the women in Ochlon valley are left alone after all the local men disappear one night. The women's worlds suddenly shrink to the day-to-day struggles to keep their sheep farms going until the war comes to their doorsteps in the form of Capt. Albrecht Wolfram and his men, who have a murky mission to carry out in the valley. Promising to leave the women alone, the Germans occupy an abandoned house and the two camps keep mostly to themselves until a harsh winter takes hold, and it becomes clear that the locals and the Germans will have to depend on one another to survive. It's also revealed that Albrecht is just as interested as the locals are in staying away from the war for as long as possible, and the two communities begin to merge. But when the weather breaks and the valley reopens to the world-and hence the war-the peculiar idyll threatens to shatter. Sheers's alternate reality is frighteningly convincing and dripping with heartbreak. This is an outstanding debut. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Sheers cleverly rewrites history in a fascinating and chilling story of World War II England a meditation on conflicted loyalties that posits Russia's fall and a failed D-Day invasion. Partially occupied by the German army, Britain has seen the unthinkable flight of Winston Churchill to Canada, leaving only pockets of underground resistance, told they have approximately two weeks of survival time to repel or impede the Nazi invasion. The women of a Welsh farming village awaken one day to find the men have vanished. Ignorant of the existence of underground cells because of their isolation and the men's secrecy, they can only cope, wait, and hope. Two months pass, winter arrives and, with it, a German patrol with a communications radio. Some women see only the enemy, but one sees the small invading force as one that might just keep them all alive. She accepts work for them in exchange for supplies. Others capitulate. Is it collaboration to let the Nazis tend their livestock in the bitter cold? Treason? What would you do?--Scott, Whitney Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HENRY JAMES wrote that the novelist's task, in an imperfect and disappointing world, is to "create the record, in default of any better enjoyment of it; to imagine, in a word, the honorable, the producible case." Perhaps the most overt way of "creating the record" in fiction is to rewrite history entirely, to place credible characters in a hypothetical world. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if India and Pakistan had remained one country after 1949? What if Muslims had conquered Europe during the Crusades? These are enticing conceits, on the surface, but rarely successful in practice. Perhaps the most notable recent example is Philip Roth's 2004 novel "The Plot Against America," which imagines an anti-Semitic regime taking power in the United States during World War II. In an essay that appeared in the Book Review when "Plot" was published, Roth admitted he had "no literary models for reimagining the historical past." Now, a few short years later, we have a novel that (intentionally or not) follows Roth's own model quite closely: Owen Sheers's "Resistance," also set during World War II, in a roughly parallel situation on the other side of the Atlantic. The novel begins in the autumn of 1944, in a remote valley in Wales; the D-Day invasion has been repulsed and the Germans have driven the Allies out of the southern half of Great Britain. One morning, the farm wives of the valley awake to find their husbands have disappeared, joining a silent, invisible resistance movement the British government organized years before. (This, Sheers takes pains to point out, is a matter of historical fact; as early as 1940 the Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section armed a force of Welsh civilians who would become guerrilla fighters in the event of a German invasion.) Not long afterward, a tiny band of German soldiers is sent into the valley to establish a radio post, with explicit orders not to interfere with the local population. Albrecht, the leader, is Oxford-educated, fluent in English and secretly unsympathetic to the Nazi cause; disobeying orders, he begins a friendly and then intimate relationship with Sarah, one of the women left behind, and their romance forms the core of the novel. This aspect of "Resistance" is too satisfying, and too predictable; one might say it belongs in a separate novel entitled "Acquiescence." Albrecht is immediately likable, a cultivated German gentleman who can quote from Walter Savage Landor's letters, whose only crime against British civilization is stealing a few books from the Bodleian Library. Sarah is winsome, smart and dutiful, writing letters to her vanished Tom almost up to the day she and Albrecht disappear together, hoping to escape to America. Far more interesting, and troubling, is a woman named Maggie, who allows an unrepentant German soldier to take the place of her husband without batting an eyelash; she needs a man to help with the chores and to train her prized colt. She isn't particularly concerned with who runs the world outside the valley. In response, in the novel's most tense and devastating scene, the insurgents execute the animal. Maggie, of course, represents what makes "Resistance" specific and fascinating: namely, the countervailing pull of loyalty to the land, and to the ancient and largely erased culture of Wales, against the abstraction of national unity, the command to "think of your country before yourself," and the crackling voice of Winston Churchill on the wireless, speaking from Canada, exhorting his countrymen to fight the Germans to the death. Sheers is at his best describing the everyday rituals of rural life amid the rocky and unforgiving Welsh countryside, and in particular the tenderness exerted by the women in caring for their livestock in a strangely childless community. The novel's most memorable image is of an orphaned lamb sewn into the skin of a larger, dead lamb to lure the bereaved ewe into accepting the orphan as her own. That mixture of brutality and kindness - the bloody exigencies carried out not only in wartime, but in everyday rural life - is the great insight of "Resistance." Unfortunately, that insight, and many others, are obscured by Sheers's dutiful, plodding prose, as if he is resisting the temptation to do anything more than create a faithful record of What Might Have Been. Sheers has the tendency to make every implication, every parallel, explicit: "He had waited before, through the longest of winters, just to see her, and he could wait again," he writes of Albrecht. "He'd entered this war expecting to die, expecting each day to be his last. But he'd been wrong. The war had led him not to death, but to her, and to life." It's a moving sentiment, but the didactic obviousness of the writing makes it seem almost false. Which brings us around, again, to the extraordinary - really not so extraordinary - coincidence of a novel like this appearing close on the heels of "The Plot Against America." In an afterword Sheers writes that "Resistance" is an effort to pay tribute to an older friend who was a member of this never activated Welsh resistance force, just as Roth described "Plot" as an effort to recreate the lives of his parents and their generation, the Greatest Generation, so-called, who did, in fact, sacrifice a great deal in the war against fascism. Filial piety aside, these disclaimers are, to my ears at least, a little disingenuous. Historical fiction is always an oblique reflection of the world in which it is produced, and it's not at all difficult to see why, in this particular moment in the Anglo-American world, we encounter so many narratives of life under authoritarian regimes, any more than it's difficult to understand our interest in remaking and reimagining the end of history. (Would "The Road," by Cormac McCarthy, have been so popular - would it even have been written - 10 years ago?) While "Resistance" is not a wholly successful novel, in its most surprising moments it demonstrates fiction's unique power - we might call it the power of the hypothesis - to stand outside of recorded history and remind us how complicated and compromising an actual act of resistance might be. 'Resistance' demonstrates fictions unique power to stand outside recorded history. Jess Row is the author of "The Train to Lo Wu," a collection of short stories. He teaches writing at The College of New Jersey.
Guardian Review
Welsh romantic that I am, exactly halfway through this remarkable first novel I came across a passage that sent a shiver down my spine. It concerned the old Welsh legend about a prince sleeping with his soldiers in secret caves ready for his country's call to arms, and the mystic suggestion by the Welsh poet David Jones that perhaps the land itself was "that very lord who sleeps". Resistance is a Welshman's book, full of Welsh passion, poetry, doubt and enigma, and I don't doubt that the positioning of that passage was deliberate - at the very core of the work, a transcendental sense of union with the earth, exemplified here by a remote mountainous enclave near the English border. The book is not in the least parochial, because its themes are universal: love of land and country, love and hate of nations, love and suspicion among people, fear and war and common decency. I like to think, though, that its inner qualities are peculiarly Welsh, and by setting his story in so spare and disregarded a patch of a generally spare and disregarded little country, Sheers has given it an extra charge of allegory. Its plot presupposes that the Germans defeated the Normandy landings of 1944, and counter-attacked so powerfully that they soon occupied almost the whole of Britain, even sending a seven-man patrol to take control of the minute Black Mountains valley that is the book's arena. The soldiers' purpose there is unexplained. There seems no reason for their presence, and the sparsely populated valley turns out to have no men in it at all, only farmers' wives and their animals. At first Resistance feels like a book in vacuum. Gradually, though, a sense of allegory deepens. The women of the valley and their German occupiers, equally distressed by the snows of a dreadful winter, learn to be comrades in misfortune. The outside world, cut off entirely from the narrow valley, half- ravaged by war and ruled now by almost unimaginable aliens, comes to seem, both to the book's characters and to its readers, in another existence. The absent males, we begin to learn, have left the valley to become members of the secret British resistance, the Auxiliary Units (which is not, incidentally, a corps of Sheers' imagination, but really did exist, and is illustrated at the back of the book by a group photograph of some staunchly unfictional-looking survivors). And allegorical love comes in, as the deprived Welsh women and the homesick German soldiers become accustomed to one another. The heroine of the story, Sarah Lewis, is still mourning the disappearance of her husband Tom, vanished who knows where, but probably lurking underground somewhere, like the soldiers of that mythical prince. Sarah loves him still, and writes a chronicle every day for the time when they meet again, if they ever do: but a second climax of the book comes when in pleasuring herself one evening she finds that it is not the homely face of dear Tom that enters her fancy, but the ascetic, scholarly features of Captain Albrecht Wolfram, 14th Panzergrenadier Division. There are tangled annexes to this complex house of enigma - one concerns the medieval Mappa Mundi from Hereford Cathedral, itself secreted in a ravine somewhere. And always out of sight or contact are the missing men of the valley, the prince's men. Are they dead or alive? Are they deep in bunkers somewhere, or roaming the night hills? Are they the guerrillas whose actions have led to so many bloody Nazi reprisals, the razing of so many villages? We are never quite sure. 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. There are details that remind us that its author was not born until well after World War II, and there are moments of longueur, too: but besides being a poet Sheers is a local man, bred out of those very hills, and everything he writes has a lyrical stamp of truth. And what about those two climaxes, the one of mythical reference, the other of human emotion? Well, they sort of merge, but indistinctly. Sarah stays faithful to her Tom, whom we must assume to be dead, and allows Albrecht to leave her life; and the legend of those warriors is fulfilled, it seems, with her lonely disappearance high on the Hatteral ridge, up there above Llanthony, in the end as loyal to her land as she is to her sleeping lord. Jan Morris's Hav is published by Faber. Owen Sheers will appear at Hay today and tomorrow. To order Resistance for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-morrissheersJUNE.1 Welsh romantic that I am, exactly halfway through this remarkable first novel I came across a passage that sent a shiver down my spine. It concerned the old Welsh legend about a prince sleeping with his soldiers in secret caves ready for his country's call to arms, and the mystic suggestion by the Welsh poet David Jones that perhaps the land itself was "that very lord who sleeps". Its plot presupposes that the Germans defeated the Normandy landings of 1944, and counter-attacked so powerfully that they soon occupied almost the whole of Britain, even sending a seven-man patrol to take control of the minute Black Mountains valley that is the book's arena. The soldiers' purpose there is unexplained. There seems no reason for their presence, and the sparsely populated valley turns out to have no men in it at all, only farmers' wives and their animals. At first Resistance feels like a book in vacuum. - Jan Morris.
Kirkus Review
In an atmospheric alternative history of World War II, the Nazis invade Great Britain, but a false peace lingers in one remote Welsh valley. British author Sheers's sensitive fiction debut pits the harsh, lyrical beauty of the natural world against the unnatural, ultimately unavoidable cruelties of war. As his story opens in the fall of 1944, the Germans are spreading across southern England after defeating the Allies at Normandy. A long-planned British resistance operation is set in motion: Overnight, seven men with farms in the Olchon valley on the Welsh borders disappear, leaving their wives to manage the backbreaking work of tending crops and animals and to wonder unceasingly about their husbands' well-being. Soon cultured, English-speaking Captain Albrecht Wolfram and his troop of five soldiers arrive on a mysterious mission. Wolfram, skeptical of the Nazi Party's "quasi-biblical language" and "banal certainty," recognizes that this ancient, secluded valley offers him and his men a haven from the war. Instead of behaving like occupiers, they help the women through a harsh winter. Wolfram's warm friendship with a young sheep farmer, Sarah Lewis, is only the most prominent of the developing relationships that lead a young member of the resistance to discern signs of collaboration among the valley women. After a period of stasis, the inevitable rude awakening ensues. There will be no happy endings. Not really a conventional war drama, but an oblique, enigmatic ode to Welsh culture, landscape and loyalties. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
By all appearances, this debut novel by an award-winning Welsh poet can be readily classified as a work of genre fiction, specifically the alternate history genre. Sheers convincingly reimagines the events of World War II; it is late 1944, and the Germans, fresh from their victory against the Russians on the eastern front, have successfully invaded and occupied England. One morning, a group of women in a remote Welsh valley awake to find their husbands have left them to join the resistance. Soon, a German patrol arrives on a mysterious mission, and the two groups are forced together when a blizzard cuts the valley off from the outside world. Sheers's debut can no more be dismissed as a genre novel than can a novel such as Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Like Roth, Sheers uses the genre to explore broader themes, particularly focusing on the different ways in which characters on both sides of the conflict alternately resist and accommodate themselves to war and occupation. Sheers has written a suspenseful narrative set against a beautifully evoked landscape. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [For another World War II novel set in Wales, see also Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl.-Ed.]-Douglas Southard, CRA International Lib., Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
SEPTEMBER -- NOVEMBER 1944 Everything Would have been different. For it would have been Another world. Edward Thomas, "As the Team's Head-Brass" In the months afterwards all of the women, at some point, said they'd known the men were leaving the valley. Just as William Jones used to forecast the weather by studying the sky or the formations of migrating birds, so the women said they'd been able to forecast the men's sudden departure. After all, they were their men, their husbands. No one could read them like they could. So no surprise if they should see what was coming. That's what the women said in the long silence afterwards. But in truth none of them saw any change in the men's behaviour. None of them knew the men were leaving and in many ways this was the hardest part of what happened. Their husbands left in the night. Just days after news of the invasion came crackling through on Maggie's wireless, propped on a Bible on her kitchen table, 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 the 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. The women, meanwhile, slept soundly in their beds. It was only in the morning when a weak September sun shone into the valley that they realised what had happened. *** For Sarah Lewis it began in her sleep. The drag, rattle, and bark of the dogs straining on their chains was so persistent it entered her dreams. A ship in storm, the sailors shouting for help from the deck, their pink faces and open mouths obscured by the spray blown up the sides of the hull. Then the noise became Marley's ghost, dragging his shackles over a flagstone floor. Clink, slump , clink, slump . Eventually, as the light brightened about the edges of the blackout curtain and Sarah surfaced through the layers of her sleep, the sound became what it was. Two dogs, urgent and distressed, pulling again and again on their rusty chains and barking, short and sharp through the constraint of their collars. Without opening her eyes Sarah slid her hand across the sheet behind her, feeling for the warm impression of her husband's body. The old horsehair mattress they slept on could hold the shape of a man all day and although Tom was usually up before her, she found comfort in touching the warm indentation of where he'd lain beside her. She stroked her palm over the thin cotton sheet. A few hairs poking through the mattress caught against her skin, hard and stubborn as the bristles on a sow's back. And there he was. A long valley where his weight had pressed the ball of his shoulder and his upper arm into the bed; a rise where his neck had lain beneath the pillow. She explored further down. A deeper bowl again, sunk by a protruding hip and then the shallower depression of his legs tapering towards the foot of the bed. As usual, Tom's shape, the landscape of him, was there. But it was cold. Normally Sarah could still feel the last traces of his body's heat, held in the fabric of the sheet just as the mattress held his form. But this morning that residue was missing. With fragments of her dreams still fading under her lids, she slid her hand around the curves and indentations again, and then beyond them, outside the borders of his body. But the sheet was cold there too. The dogs below her window barked and barked, their sound making pictures in her mind's eye: their sharp noses tugging up with each short yap, exposing the white triangles of their necks, flashing on and off like a warning. She lay there listening to them, their chains rising and falling on the cobblestones of the yard. Tom must have been up early. Very early. Not in the morning at all but in the night. She turned on her side and shifted herself across the bed. The blankets blinked with her movement and she felt a stab of cold air at her shoulder. Pulling them tight about her neck, she lay there within the impression of her husband, trying not to disturb the contours of his map. Everything about her felt heavy, as if her veins were laced with lead. She was trying to think where Tom could be but the barks of the dogs were distracting her. Her mind was blurred, as buckled as a summer's view through a heat haze. Why hadn't he taken the dogs? He always took the dogs. Did he say something last night? She couldn't remember. She couldn't remember anything past their dinner. She opened her eyes. In front of her the bedroom window was bright about the ill-fitting blackout cloth, a thin square outline of light burning into the darkened room. She blinked at it, confused. The window looked into the western flank of the valley, and yet there was light. Too much light. The sun must already be over the Black Hill on the other side of the house. She must have slept late. She never slept this late. She rose quickly, hoping movement would dispel her mild unease. Tugging roughly on the heavy blankets, she made the bed, tucking their edges under the mattress. Then she plumped the pillows, shaking them as if to wake them. Brushing a few of Tom's hairs from the one beside hers she paused for a second and stilled herself, as if the hairs might summon Tom himself. She listened, one hand still resting on the pillow. But there was nothing. Just the usual ticks and groans of the old building waking and warming, and outside, the dogs, barking and barking. She pulled back the blackout cloth and opened the thin curtains behind it with both hands, unveiling the room to light. It was a bright, clear day. She closed her eyes against the glare. When she opened them again white spots shimmered over her vision. Drawing the sleeve of her nightdress over her wrist she wiped away the veneer of condensation from one of the small panes and looked down into the yard below. The dogs, both border collies, both bitches, sensed the movement above them and barked and strained harder in response, pulling their chains taut behind them. Sarah looked above the outhouse where they were tied. Over the top of its jigsaw slate roof she could see the lower paddock rising up to meet the sweep and close of the valley's end wall. Except for a few grazing sheep it was empty, and so were the steep-sided hills on either side, their edges bald against the blue sky. Turning away from the window, she pulled her nightdress over her head. Again she felt the cold air on her skin. The dress's neckline held her hair for a moment, then let it go all at once so it fell heavily about her shoulders. She sat on the edge of the bed, put on her knickers, a vest, and began balling a pair of woollen stockings over her hand, her forehead puckered in a frown. Catching herself in the dressing-table mirror she paused and ran a finger up the bridge of her nose between her eyebrows. A slight crease was forming there. She'd only noticed it recently; a short line that remained even when her brow was relaxed. Still sitting on the edge of the bed she gathered up her hair and, turning her profile to the mirror, held it behind her head with one hand, exposing her neck. That crease was the only mark on her face. Other than that her skin was still smooth. She turned the other way with both hands behind her head now. She should like a wedding to go to. Or a dance, a proper dance where she could wear a dress and her hair up like this. That dress Tom bought for her on their first anniversary. She couldn't have worn it more than twice since. Tom. Where was he? She dropped her hair and pulled on her stockings. Reaching into the dressing-table drawer, she put on a blouse and began doing up the buttons, the crease on her forehead deepening again. Bad news had been filtering into the valley every day for the last few weeks. First the failed landings in Normandy. Then the German counterattack. The pages of the newspapers were dark with the print of the casualty lists. London was swollen with people fleeing north from the coast. They had no phone lines this far up, and apart from Maggie's farm, which sat higher in the valley, the whole area was dead for radio reception. But news of the war still found its way to them. The papers, often a couple of days old, the farrier when he came, Reverend Davies on his fortnightly visits to The Court, all of them brought a trickle of stories from the changing world beyond the valley. Everyone was unnerved but Sarah knew these stories had unsettled Tom more than most. He rarely spoke of it, but for him they threw a shadow in the shape of his brother, David. David was three years younger than Tom. He'd had no farm of his own so he'd been conscripted to fight. Two months ago he was declared missing in action and, while Tom maintained an iron resolve that his brother would appear again, the sudden shift in events had shaken his optimism. For Sarah news of the war still seemed to have an unreal quality, even when a few days ago the names of the battlegrounds changed from French villages to English ones. There were marks of the conflict all about her: the patchwork of ploughed fields down by the river once kept for grazing; the boys from her schooldays, and the farmhands, many of them gone for years now. But unlike Tom she didn't have a relative in the fighting. Her own older brothers had been absent from her life ever since they'd argued with her father and broken from the family home when she was still a girl. They'd bought a farm together outside Brecon, large enough to have saved them both from the army. So Sarah didn't possess that vital thread connecting her to the war that brought the news stories so vividly to life for so many others. There were women here, in the valley, who had lost sons, and in the early years she'd seen other mourning mothers and wives in Longtown and Llanvoy. But even these women, with their swollen eyes and dark dresses, seemed to have passed into a different place, a parallel world of grief. The sight of them evoked sympathy in Sarah, sometimes a flush of silent gratitude that Tom was in a reserved occupation, but never empathy. Only once in the last five years had the war really impacted upon her. When the bomber crashed up on the bluff. Then, suddenly, it had become physical. She'd been woken by the whine of its dive followed by the terrible land-locked thunder of its explosion. Tom held her afterwards, speaking softly into her hair, "Shh, bach, shh now." In the morning they'd all gone up to look. Tom and she took the ponies. When they got there the Home Guard and the police from Hereford had already put a cordon around the wreckage so they just stood at a distance and watched, the thin rope singing and whipping in the hilltop wind. Beyond the crashed plane she'd glimpsed a tarpaulin laid over a shallow hump. "One of the crew," Tom had said with a jerk of his chin. She'd agreed with him. "Yes, must be," although she'd thought the hump looked too small, too short, to be the body of a man. The ponies shifted uneasily under them, pawing the ground, tossing their heads. They were disturbed by this sculpture of twisted metal that had appeared on their hill, by this charred and complicated limb half embedded in the soil as if it had erupted from the earth, not fallen from the sky. And so was Sarah. She'd heard about the Blitz, and about Liverpool and Coventry, its cathedral burning through the night. She'd even seen their own bombers out on training runs. But she'd never seen an enemy plane before. Usually they were just a distant drone to her, a long revolving hum above the clouds as they returned from a raid on Swansea or banked for home after emptying their payloads over Birmingham. But now, here was one of them, on the hill above her farm. Massive and perfunctory. So ordinary in its blunt engineering. And under that tarpaulin was a real German. A man from over there who had flown over here to kill them. She dressed quickly in a long skirt and cardigan and went downstairs to pull on her boots in the porch by the kitchen door. As she bent to lace them, she noticed Tom's weren't there. Not just his work boots but his summer ones too; both pairs were missing. She stared for a moment at the space where they'd been, four vague outlines in a scattering of dust blown in under the door. Leaning forward on her knee, she touched one of these empty footprints as if it could tell her where he'd gone. But there was nothing, just the cold stone against her fingertips. She shook her head. What was she doing? She stood up, took her coat from the hook on the back of the door, pushed her arms through its sleeves, and drew its belt tight about her waist. Lifting the door's latch she stepped out into the brightness of the cobbled yard where the day fell in on her with a cool wash of air. She breathed in deeply, feeling the first metallic tang of autumn at the back of her throat. Shards of sunlight reflected off the stones. The dogs barked faster and louder to greet her. She moved towards them and they settled back on their haunches, stepping the ground with their forepaws, quivering with anticipation as if a voltage ran under their skins. *** The dogs, let loose of their chains, wove and slipped about her as she walked up the slope across the lower paddock and through the coppiced wood behind the farm. The extra hours of restraint had charged them with a frantic energy and they raced ahead of her, ears flat, before doubling back, their sorrowful eyes looking up at hers, their heads low and their coats slickly black in the dappled sunlight. Sarah, in contrast, felt her legs heavy and awkward beneath her. She took the slope with more pace, pressing the heels of her palms into her thighs with each step. Twice she found herself stopping to rest against the trunk of a tree. She was twenty-six years old, worked every day and was usually through this wood before she knew it, but this morning it was as if one of the dogs' chains had snagged around her feet and was dragging her back down the hill with every step she took. Excerpted from Resistance by Owen Sheers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
