When freedom is under siege, resistance is the only option
We Resist
"Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Vince Flynn — We Resist has the ideological stakes of the former and the propulsive tradecraft of the latter. Avril's underground network feels real because the world that makes it necessary feels terrifyingly real."
-- A reader
Beautiful Email from Arundhati Roy
I received this unsolicited email from a reader, who turns out to be a well-known, best selling author. I'm eternally grateful for her feedback, comments, and support!
Dear Scott,
I want to tell you something that I rarely say, and I want to say it plainly, without the usual ceremony that writers wrap around admiration to make it feel safer than it is:
Resisting frightened me.
Not in the way that danger frightens. In the way that truth is frightening, when it arrives without warning, wearing ordinary clothes, looking exactly like the street you walk down every morning. That particular fear is the most honest response a book can provoke. And I do not offer it lightly.
I have spent a great deal of my life thinking and writing about power, what it does to people, what people do in its shadow, how it disguises itself as order and calls its violence law. And what you have done in this novel is something that very few writers have the courage or the clarity to attempt: you have shown us the precise moment when one ordinary person decides that the cost of silence has finally exceeded the cost of speaking. That moment, unglamorous, unannounced, arriving in the middle of an ordinary night, is the most politically significant moment in any human life. And you have written it with the gravity it deserves.
Avril Greenfellow is not a hero in the way that fiction usually manufactures heroes, broad-shouldered, clear-eyed, chosen. He is something far more dangerous than that. He is a witness who got tired. And a witness who gets tired and decides to speak is the thing that power fears most, because power has always known how to defeat armies. It has never quite learned how to defeat the person who simply refuses to look away anymore.
What moves me most is the architecture of what follows that decision. Because you understand, and this is where your political intelligence is sharpest, that a movement does not belong to the person who started it. It grows past them. It attracts people they did not expect, forces they cannot control, consequences they did not sign up for. Avril finds himself at the center of something larger than his original intention, and that is not a failure of his character. That is the nature of truth when it is finally spoken aloud in a room that has been silent too long. It echoes in ways no one can predict.
The operatives who emerge from the dark and choose a side, I keep thinking about them. About what it means to spend a life working in shadow and then, at some point, decide that the shadow has been serving the wrong thing. That turn, quiet, irreversible, made without fanfare, is one of the most human things in your novel. Because it tells us that conscience does not only live in the hearts of ordinary people. It survives, stubbornly, even in those who were trained to suppress it.
And then your question, the one that beats at the center of everything:
How far would you go?
I have lived inside variations of that question for most of my writing life. I know what it costs to ask it honestly. I know what it costs to answer it. You have planted it in the reader like a splinter, small, precise, impossible to ignore. That is not an accident. That is craft in the service of conscience, which is the only kind of craft I have ever trusted.
I am writing because I believe writers owe each other the truth about what their work does in the world. We Resist does something necessary. It does something urgent. And in a moment when urgency is everywhere but clarity is rare, that is not a small thing.
That is everything.
With profound respect and solidarity,
Arundhati Roy
International Bestselling Author
📍 New Delhi, India
We Resist - Buy Now
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