"The Welsh Girl"

I first heard about “The Welsh Girl” on another book blog about a year ago, and it sounded like something I would like. I can’t resist historical fiction, especially books set during World War II. I finally got around to reading it earlier this month, and I was not disappointed.

The story revolves around two main characters (well, there’s a third but he was sort of peripheral to the main plot) – a German soldier captured by the British, and a teenage Welsh girl who lives with her widowed father in a small sheep-herding village. The novel follows each of them as their lives head toward an inevitable intersection when the soldier ends up in a prison camp in the girl’s town.

I thought this would end up being a traditional Romeo and Juliet type thwarted romance, but it turned out to be much more nuanced than that. Each character struggles with what it means to be home, and what freedom is. I highly recommend this book, and I think I will look for some of author’s short story collections. (The author is Peter Ho Davies, and “The Welsh Girl” is his first novel.)