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From the acclaimed writer Peter Ho Davies comes an engrossing wartime love story set in the stunning landscape of North Wales during the final, harrowing months of World War II.
Young Esther Evans has lived her whole life within the confines of her remote mountain village. The daughter of a fiercely nationalistic sheep farmer, Esther yearns for a taste of the wider world that reaches her only through broadcasts on the BBC. Then, in the wake of D-day, the world comes to her in the form of a German POW camp set up on the outskirts of Esther's village.
The arrival of the Germans in the camp is a source of intense curiosity in the local pub, where Esther pulls pints for both her neighbors and the unwelcome British guards. One summer evening she follows a group of schoolboys to the camp boundary. As the boys heckle the prisoners across the barbed wire fence, one soldier seems to stand apart. He is Karsten Simmering, a German corporal, only eighteen, a young man of tormented conscience struggling to maintain his honor and humanity. To Esther's astonishment, Karsten calls out to her.
These two young people from worlds apart will be drawn into a perilous romance that calls into personal question the meaning of love, family, loyalty, and national identity. The consequences of their relationship resonate through the lives of a vividly imagined cast of characters: the drunken BBC comedian who befriends Esther, Esther's stubborn father, and the resentful young British "evacuee" who lives on the farm -- even the German-Jewish interrogator investigating the most notorious German prisoner in Wales, Rudolf Hess.
Peter Ho Davies has been hailed for his "all-encompassing empathy that is without borders" (Elle). That trancendent compassion shines through The Welsh Girl, a novel that is both thought-provoking and emotionally enthralling.
Davies s achievement is significant: like good social history, The Welsh Girl invites us to question history s master narratives, which have a way of wiping out the contradictions and complications of real life, much like the propaganda films Karsten is forced to watch in the P.O.W. camp.
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| $99.99 | Digital |
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Surinder Rakhra
reviewed The Welsh Girl on August 26, 2017 The Welsh Girl
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies is set in a Welsh village near the end of WWII. Davies splendidly sets his story against the backdrop of WWII without weighing it down with too much action or too many war terms. It is also set against a pastoral countryside so there are very lyrical and elegant passages. There's also a love story between the Welsh girl and the German POW, but it goes beyond that.
What's most intriguing about this story is that it is driven by the characters' actions and development during the war. The story is told in third person subjective so that we get an intimate perspective and alternates between Esther, Rotheram, and Karsten.
Esther is a seventeen-year-old Welsh girl who works at a pub serving the Welsh as well as the English soldiers. She's curious about the POW camp. Rotheram is a German Jew that left to England on his mother's insistence and became an interrogator. He is sent to the Welsh village to interrogate a supposed Nazi feigning amnesia. Karsten is a German soldier who surrenders and gets sent to a POW camp at a Welsh village. All three of them change and gain something by the end of the novel despite the many tragedies.
For instance, Esther gains a new definition of patriotism: "Why fatherland and not motherland? She'd wondered. But now she thinks: Why should the love of fathers or mothers be equated to love of country? Couldn't you love your country by loving your children? Weren't they your nation, at the last?"
Karsten gains a sense of serenity, "He had felt such peace, he was sure it [the war] must be over, that they'd separate and rise to the bright news of armistice. An end to the war that was neither victory nor defeat, just peace."
Rotheram comes to terms with his identity' "It had never occurred to Rotheram that he could be unashamed of fleeing, of escaping, of living. Of being Jewish'if that was what he was. And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism…The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such a pure freedom to be without a country."
By Claudia Estrada
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