The Welsh Girl, by Peter Ho Davies

The author of two impressive, award-winning short-story collections, Peter Ho Davies was named as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2003, and his debut is appropriately ambitious. The place is Wales, 1944: Rotherham, a German Jewish refugee working in intelligence is dispatched to interrogate Hitler's real-life former deputy Rudolf Hess. In British hands since a botched, mysterious flying mission in 1941, Hess has persistently claimed amnesia. Rotherham's is just one of many attempts to coerce the prisoner to talk, yet the sharpness of Hess, "more a shy uncle than fierce deputy Führer", who immediately identifies Rotherham's anglicisation of his name and the reason behind it, wrongfoots him and frustrates his purpose.

Further north, in the Snowdonian hills, 17-year-old Esther pulls pints in the village pub; her proudly nationalist home has unwillingly swelled its ranks with evacuees and English sappers erecting a POW camp. With the addition of performers from the BBC's Light Programme, the village seems besieged, yet despite the locals' protests the pub landlord needs the extra custom, and for Esther's impoverished sheep farmer family, "between the national subsidy and the demand for woollen uniforms the war is quite simply holding them up". All this is about to change: D-Day has almost arrived, altering the course of the war.

Esther lost her mother young, learnt the English her father despises, longs to see the world, or at least Liverpool. She's chosen to take in Jim, the smallest, scrawniest evacuee; their relationship is tense, spitting, protective. Having rejected slow Rhys, the son of her former schoolteacher, she dreams of matinee idol-romance with the sapper, Colin, but a moment's misunderstanding between them ensures a future of concealment.

The third player in the drama is the gentle German corporal Karsten, incarcerated in the POW camp, which is ringed daily by taunting schoolboys. The infighting between the German POWs, unable to face the fact that they are losing the war, and several encounters between Esther and Karsten occupy the main section of the novel. The need for secrecy, arising both from pragmatism and the shame of surrender, connects them both with Rotherham, whose next mission after his failed attempt with Hess is to be seconded to the camp.

In Ho Davies's rich evocation of this momentous Welsh summer, "froth fills the air like blossom"; Esther is filled with "emotion for her soldier like a slow-pouring glass of Guinness". Yet the descriptions of dour Welsh insularity, which Esther identifies as "licensed misanthropy", come off almost too pat, as does the bilingual Esther's necessary deception, neatly tied in with the hint of a double meaning in the novel's title. More effective is the constant reinforcement of the theme of belonging - of cynefin, passed through the non-straying maternal line of the flock, of which Esther is emblematic. Karsten too is trapped. Eventually he will return home - but to Soviet-controlled East Germany.

Hess's fate is well known to history. Only Rotherham, a true intelligencer, can, it appears, successfully blend and shapeshift into the new world order.