This week my blog guest is Anna Normann, actually the pen name of two co-writers – Natalie Normann and Anan Singh, whose novel The Silent Resistance had a paperback edition released last week (19 June 2025). Natalie, one of the pair of writers, is sharing the inspiration behind the novel for my blog readers. Fascinating story …
Hi Morton and thank you for having me on your blog today. I wanted to share a few thoughts about how the idea for my latest book came to be. I’ve written it with my good friend Anan, and we had so much fun doing this book together after so many years.
I always wanted to write about the Second World War, and years ago I convinced Anan we should try to write something together. We went on to write seven books together before I decided to focus on writing historical romance series.
The Second World War caught my imagination early. I was fascinated by the stories I heard from family members growing up, and I read everything I could get my hands on. Most of the books written before the eighties focused mainly on ‘the boys in the woods’ as they are called in Norway – the brave and heroic resistance fighters fighting the nazis against all odds. I loved it, but it left an impression women didn’t participate much.
Every story, non-fiction and fiction, had men as heroes. Then, over the years, new historians realised there were other stories to be told, stories that were was missing from the official narrative, and they started looking elsewhere. Perhaps they had a woman in their family who joined the Resistance, or perhaps she was a spy fraternising with the enemy for information or she smuggled people out of the country. And finally women started to talk about their experiences, and they were so much more than stories about housewives standing in line for food.
I couldn’t get enough of stories like that.
When Anan and I started our first collaboration, we wrote a spy story set in Germany during the war. It was great fun and even if we moved on to different genres for our next books, we always wanted to write about the war again. If we could only find the right story…
That idea showed up 29 years later when we finally found something we were both excited about.
The Silent Resistance grew from after we stumbled over a book about ‘The Bigamy Law‘, an amendment in the Marriage Act that devastated the lives of women and their children. In the midst of everything that went on during the Occupation, their own government failed them bitterly.
And it was such a strong betrayal that we couldn’t let it go.
Anni’s husband is at sea, unable to return home, and she has to manage as best she can, to keep their daughter safe and happy. When Guri, her mother-in-law, asks her to help the Resistance, she accepts. Anni pays a high prize for her participation, even ending up in a women’s camp after the war.
Their story is one of many. Ordinary women stepped up and fought the Nazis, knowing the danger to themselves, but they did it anyway. It wasn’t a choice, it was their duty.
About Anna Normann
Anna Normann is the pseudonym of authors Anan Singh and Natalie Normann, and it all happened because of a bet. Sometime in the nineteen eighties, while watching a movie with a so-so plot, they started arguing about improving the plot and how they could write a better story than that mess. And then Anan’s wife said ‘I bet you can’t’ …
Since then, they have published seven books together in Norwegian, exploring different genres. Their first novel, set in the Second World War, won a competition in 1995 for ‘Norway’s best entertainment novel’.
The Silent Resistance is their first book in English together.
Website: https://natalienormannauthor.com/
To keep in touch with Natalie/Anna you can use the following social media links:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NatalieNormannAuthor?locale=nb_NO
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natalienormann/
X: https://x.com/NatalieNormann1
About The Silent Resistance
Occupied Norway, 1944. Anni endures the war alone, aiding the resistance while longing for news of her sailor husband. Her daughter, Ingrid, is her joy, and Anni is determined to keep her safe. But when a German official is billeted at their home, danger escalates, and Anni faces an agonising dilemma.
London, 1952. Ingrid has been trying to understand her mother’s mysterious disappearance at the war’s end. Clinging to Anni’s promise that she would always come back for her, Ingrid sets out to discover what happened all those years ago.
Buying links:
A Very Hygge Holiday (both books on Amazon Kindle UK): Here
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