Paperback: Resistance, by Owen Sheers

Under an imagined occupation, as Germany wins the Second World War, the Welsh valley of Olchon is the perfect setting to illustrate how the casual brutality of nature mirrors the random violence of war. With the men gone, the women struggle with instinct and shame as the concrete "missing" of their husbands, in a landscape where even carrion crows have partners, curdles into ambiguous moral resolution.