
Unconditional Surrender
Emyr Humphreys(Author)
Seren (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 28. November 1997
Book
Paperback/Softback
180 pages
978-1-85411-213-2 (ISBN)
Description
This award-winning author's nineteenth novel explores the effects of the closing months of World War II on a small community in a corner of north Wales. The story is told through two voices, the local rector and a German countess in his care as a displaced person. A young conscientious objector and a gifted German prisoner of war contest the love of the rector's idealistic daughter, while the two narrators and their families negotiate the fall of fascism and nationalism and the effects of winning the war on older, established relationships.
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Bridgend
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Poetry Wales Press
Weight
205 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85411-213-2 (9781854112132)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Emyr Humphreys, born in 1919 in Prestatyn, north Wales, is one of the foremost Welsh novelists writing in English. He is the author of over twenty novels, of short story volumes, verse and non-fiction work, and was described by the poet R.S. Thomas as 'the supreme interpreter of Welsh life'. In the early 40's, as a conscientious objector, and whilst studying history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, he was sent to work on the land during the Second World War. He subsequently went as a war relief worker to the Middle East and then to Italy. In the mid-fifties, he joined BBC Wales as a drama producer, before taking a lectureship in Drama at the University of Wales, Bangor. In 1972, after remarkable success as a young novelist, winning the Somerset Maugham Award for Hear and Forgive (1952) and the Hawthornden Prize for A Toy Epic (1958), his most famous novel, written in both Welsh and English, he embarked on a career as a full-time writer. His work, which has remained true throughout his career to the realist novel, is concerned with goodness, with social and political conscience. Mass culture is an opiate, which the necessarily singular voice of the fiction writer must (in however beleaguered a manner) continue to oppose.' In his volume of short stories, Old People are a Problem (Seren, 2003), he explores a variety of situations in which the young and the old are obliged to live together at the beginning of the 21st century. His most recent work is The Woman at the Window (Seren, 2009).