Resistance: A Novel - Hardcover

As she has done in her novels Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, and Where or When, Anita Shreve once again leads readers into a harrowing world where lives are catastrophically overturned by emotion. Set in a Belgian village amid the wreckage of World War II, Resistance is a powerful exploration of passion, self-discovery, and sacrifice from one of our most accomplished storytellers. Just as the Nazi occupation forces have drained her village of coffee, meat, and chocolate, the war has also depleted whatever joy there may have been in Claire Daussois's marriage. On their small farm in the south of Belgium, Claire and her husband, Henri, shelter refugees - Jews, Allied pilots, and fleeing Belgian soldiers - before passing them along toward France and freedom. Claire nurses the wounded, acts as interpreter, and waits for the war to end - and, in a way she finds difficult to admit even to herself, for her own life to change. And it does, when an American B-17 bomber is downed near their village. The pilot, badly injured, is found by a young boy who turns to Claire for help in saving him. Henri is away on Resistance work. As the pilot heals and recovers in her attic hiding place, Claire begins to awaken to the possibility of love. Over the course of a mere twenty days, closed off from the world and the war in her farmhouse, Claire and Lieutenant Ted Brice experience a life-changing passion that neither has felt before. That their love is also haunted and impossible only makes it more precious. The war recedes in the face of their joy - before imposing itself once more with shocking suddenness and inconceivable horror. Resistance is the story of a young Belgian woman, an American pilot, and the small war-torn village that shelters them. Richly peopled and fearlessly, gorgeously passionate, it is a powerful exploration of emotion at odds with commitment. No reader who has loved - or resisted love - will forget this lucid and moving tale.

Anita Shreve teaches writing at Amherst College and divides her time between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She began writing as a high school teacher. One of her first published stories was awarded an O Henry Prize in 1975. She became a journalist, spending three years in Kenya. Back in the US, she wrote the non-fiction books Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone and began her first novel Eden Close. In 1989, she turned to fiction full time. She is the author of many acclaimed novels and the international number-one bestsellers The Pilot's Wife, Fortune's Rocks and Sea Glass. Francine Brody won the Flora Robson Prize at RADA. She has performed all over the UK in plays such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Importance of Being Earnerst and The Glass Menagerie. Film and television work includes I Dreamed of Africa, Maigret and The Hotel Majestic and Lost And Found. She has recorded a number of audio books including the unabridged version of Bridget Jones's Diary.