Welsh Girl

It's not often that a book changes the way you think about something - especially something so familiar. Therefore, what Peter Ho Davies has done in "The Welsh Girl" is remarkable, especially considering it's a debut novel.
It's not easy to accommodate the cosy, patriotic view of war portrayed in a thousand Hollywood blockbusters alongside this more torrid account. There is no "Great Escape" heroism here - just scared prisoners, mere boys, branded by themselves and others as cowards for surrendering; convincing themselves they would have preferred death, but secretly knowing that (given the opportunity) they would do exactly the same again.
The multi-faceted plot - a young farmer's daughter, a German prisoner and a Jewish intelligence officer - is elegantly interwoven and never descends into a complicated quagmire.
There are many parallels between the different plot strands - for example, Esther is motherless, Karsten is fatherless (despite coming from the Fatherland, he ironically muses), and both blame these losses for their feeling adrift in life; both characters feel trapped, physically and metaphorically, and both try to deal with their respective confinements as best they can.
This is a BIG book, full of BIG themes, but at its heart it's a love story. It's even tempting to view the solypsistic rape scene as an allagory of the English rape of Wales - but I won't!