Owen Sheers Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

Resistance (2007)
White Ravens (2009)
The Gospel of Us (2012)
I Saw a Man (2014)

Plays In Publication Order

Unicorns, Almost (2011)
The Two Worlds of Charlie F. (2012)
Pink Mist (2013)
Mametz (2017)
The Green Hollow (2019)

Collections In Publication Order

The Blue Book (2002)
Skirrid Hill (2006)
To Provide All People (2019)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

The Dust Diaries (2004)
A Poet’s Guide To Britain (2009)
Calon (2012)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Owen Sheers Books Overview

Resistance

1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D Day landings, a German counterattack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied. The seat of British government has fled to Worcester, Churchill to Canada. A network of British Resistance cells is all that is left to defy the German army.
Against this backdrop, Resistance opens with Sarah Lewis, a twenty six year old farmer’s wife, waking to find her husband, Tom, has disappeared. She is not alone, as all the other women in the Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence, the women regroup as an isolated, all female community and wait, hoping for news.
Later, a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups together, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of the patrol. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened.
Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers s debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of grace and power.

White Ravens

New Stories from the Mabinogion is an exciting series of contemporary novels by leading authors, reworking ancient Celtic myth cycles. The first two stories are published in October 2009. Authors so far commissioned are Owen Sheers, Niall Griffiths, Russell Celyn Jones and Gwyneth Lewis. The eleven stories in the Mabinogion are diverse medieval Welsh tales taken from two fourteenth century manuscripts collating a much earlier oral tradition. They were first translated into English in the nineteenth century. They bring us Celtic mythology, a history of the Island of Britain seen through the eyes of medieval Wales, and include the first appearance in literature of King Arthur but tell tales that stretch way beyond the boundaries of contemporary Wales. There is enchantment and shape shifting, conflict, peacemaking, love, betrayal. A wife conjured out of flowers is punished for unfaithfulness by being turned into an owl,Arthur and his knights chase a magical wild boar and its piglets from Ireland, across south Wales to Cornwall, a prince changes places with the king of the underworld for a year Each author has chosen a story to reinvent and retell for their own reasons and in their own way: creating fresh, contemporary tales which speak to us today, while tapping into a vigorous source of stories still flowing just beneath the surface of our culture. White Ravens by Owen Sheers is the first in the series and is based on the tale of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr, one of the most action packed in the whole myth cycle. This 2009 retelling moves this bloodthirsty tale of Welsh/Irish power struggles and family tensions into the twenty first century, but retains many of the bizarre and magical happenings of the original.

The Blue Book

This impressive debut includes poems on a wide range of themes: from recollections of a return to Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence in a rural town in Wales; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems. Owen Sheers has a talent for visual imagery, a flair for narrative and a grasp of the personal as acute as his awareness of the wider world. His astute portraits of relatives and contemporaries entice us into other lives. The Blue Book is a startlingly good first collection by a young writer of considerable ability and promise.

Skirrid Hill

Ideas of separation and divorce the geographical divides of borders, the separation of the dead and the living, the movement from childhood to adulthood, and the end of relationships drive this poetry collection from one of Great Britain’s rising young talents. The collection revolves around the poems ‘Y Gaer’ and ‘The Hillfort,’ the titles themselves suggesting the linguistic divide in Wales, from poems concerned with childhood, a Welsh landscape, and family to an outward looking vision that is both geographic and historic.

The Dust Diaries

At a family reunion in Wales several years ago, the prize winning poet Owen Sheers stumbled across the mesmerizing story of his great great uncle Arthur Cripps, a mysterious figure who turned from poetry to missionary work in Africa and ultimately became a shamanlike figure, ministering to the locals. Arthur Cripps left his native England in a ship set for southern Rhodesia in 1900. During his time as a missionary in the British colony, Cripps became passionate about indigenous ways, leaving him ostracized from the largely racist, conservative European minority. Railing against colonial injustice, Cripps became a hero to the native population. He chose to exile himself from the Anglican church, factions of which branded him a heretic and burned down his churches. All the while he hid the soul racking secret of what had driven him from England into the heart of Africa. The Dust Diaries is the haunting record of Sheers’s all consuming attempt to piece together the luminous fragments of Arthur Cripps’s remarkable life, and to understand the mystery of why he abandoned England for life in the African veldt a journey that takes Sheers from the genteel reading rooms of Oxford University’s libraries to the parched landscape of contemporary Zimbabwe. Refracting Cripps’s life through the prism of his own vivid imagination, Sheers illuminates the devastating effects of power, the potent effects of grace, and the legacy of an extraordinary life.

A Poet’s Guide To Britain

Introduced and selected by the poet presenter Owen Sheers, ‘A Poet’s Guide To Britain‘ is a major poetry anthology that ties in with the BBC series of the same name. Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience our identities, our country, and our land. Under the headings of six varieties of British landscape London and Cities, Villages and Towns, Mountains and Moorland, Islands, Woods and Forest, and Coast and Sea he has collected poems that evoke qualities of the land, city and sea and have become part of the way we see these landscapes. The anthology follows a similar format to the BBC series, while also supplementing the poems included in the programme with his own personal favourites.