The Incident

The title poem of E.E. Jones’s first collection tells the story of an unremarkable day in August 1944, when nothing much happened: the weather was beautiful, a dog barked, and the women of Amsterdam went on making jam.

The Incident is a book about History and Fascism, what our times make of us, and the violence we allow to be done to others – minorities, refugees, dissidents, asylum seekers, benefit claimants. These are stories of solidarity and resistance, told with tenderness and fury and a passionate commitment to a world still possible – Sylvia Pankhurst and Kier Hardie, Auden and Erika Mann; William Tyndale and Nye Bevan, the Peterloo dead and the Belgian Resistance fighters who in 1943 stopped a train bound for Auschwitz. At the heart of the book is a series of portraits of remarkable women who tried to resist, like Rosa Parks, Sophie Scholl, Anne Frank, and Jo Cox.