Unconditional Surrender

In the months between May and August 1945 the world is both winding down and changing forever. The European war over, Britain looks to the future and prepares for a general election. Unknown to all but a few, life is about to be pitched into the atomic age. Unconditional Surrender charts these changes though two voices, the rector of a rural parish in north Wales, and a mysterious German countess housed under his care as a displaced person. At the centre of their attention is Meg, the rector's daughter, and her increasingly fraught relationships with a conscientious objector and a young prisoner-of-war held nearby. The results of these relationships are as momentous, in their way, as the bombing of Hiroshima. Unconditional Surrender sets young against old, local against international, and follows the changing social mores of a unique period in history. Fascinating in its characterisation and scope, beautifully executed, this is Emyr Humphreys at his best. Emyr Humphreys is the author of twenty novels in English and Welsh, and has also published collections of stories and poetry. He has written screenplays and adapted other works for television and radio, in addition to producing and directing in both of those media. His novels have won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year, Hawthornden and other prizes.

About the Author :
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).