The Officer's Daughter (Portobello Books hardback 2007, paperback 2008)
The Sandbeetle (Hodder and Stoughton, hdbk 1993, Flamingo pbk 1994)
The Book of Wishes and Complaints (Hutchinson, hdbk 1991, Flamingo pbk 1992)
Work in Progress: The Small Book
Sixteen-year-old Marta has always longed to follow her father and lead armies into battle. Instead she finds herself leading her fellow girl-guides on a camping trip on the border between Poland and German on the very day in September 1939 that the Nazis invade. Immediately the girls are spirited across their Polish motherland to take refuge in a remote convent. But Marta's safety is soon under threat...So begins a perilous adventure across thousands of miles - from the logging camps of Siberian Kazakhstan to the Red Cross field hospitals of Persia - during which Marta is forced to draw on reserves of courage she didn't think she had and make choices she never imagined she'd face.
From reviews of The Officer's Daughter
'What a story, and what a heroine! Passion and pride, bravery and foolishness - it's all here.' Isabel Allende
'This is a huge book in every sense of the word: it is a tour de force, a wonderful novel which will stay with you for years. Very highly recommended.' Historical Novels Review
'The Officer's Daughter is a gem...a haunting quality saturates the story, a rawness reminiscent of A Thousand Splendid Suns, and like Khaled Hosseini's novel, it leaves you with a deeply felt sense of the powerlessness and arbitrarirness of life adrift on the detritus of war. Part of this is due no doubt to the fact that at its core is a story wrapped around real people, which lends it a rare power and authenticity that lingers after the last page.' Bookseller
'This good, old-fashioned tale cries out for a screen adaptation.' The Tablet
'Rohan's work is quite simply fascinating, wholly gripping and a delight to read...We award Zina ten Bookmunch points.' Bookmunch
(Anybody interested to watch me talking about this book can watch the video interview that I had thought was going to be only audio, and was duly alarmed by reality.)
Contact my agent, Isobel Dixon, of Blake Friedmann
Leo Beck is a Jewish child refugee. Sent away from Berlin in the Thirties to escape the horrors that are to come, Leo is fostered with an eccentric couple in London. He works hard to fit into his new surroundings, and wins a place at Oxford where he falls in love with the self-confident, very English Eleanor. Then the war comes, and with it a wave of xenophobic feeling. To his shock and horror, Leo finds himself classed as an enemy alien and flung onto a ship destined for the other side of the world...
The Sandbeetle is at once a richly detailed, gripping portrait of one man's struggle for identity, and a powerful exploration of the nature of belonging: to a country, a family, a race, a religious tradition - to humanity.
From reviews of The Sandbeetle
'With her debut, The Book of wishes and Complaints, Zina Rohan climbed so high that it seemed the only place for her writing to go was down. It is a tribute to her talents and nerve that her second novel, The Sandbeetle, floats even higher. Rohan is a teller of tales able to span years with one sharply etched scene, to hold a reader to events even while she is lifting them across the arc of a fable.' Independent on Sunday
'There is humour as well as pathos in Leo's sharply observant account. Rohan deploys powerful metaphors of assimilation: the chameleon merging instinctively with its background; the sandbeetle making its home in the most inhospitable of habitats.' Times Literary Supplement
'Rohan's clear,clean prose packs a cumulative punch. The beauty of her writing lies in her mastery of understatement. The Sandbeetle is a good story well told.' Guardian
'There is a quiet, trenchant elegance to Zina Rohan's prose which, together with a lurking sense of irony, strikes a rich, dynamic balance between coolness and warmth, darkness and light, comedy and outrage. The Sandbeetle is an engrossing, densely-textured narrative fabric, crafted from robust, affectionately acerbic characterisation, sharp-eyed attention to fine human detail - comic or poignant or both - and Rohan's understated but sure formal control over her lively, argumentative cast. Her astute compassion, her refusal either to judge or offer pat solutions, combine with this consummate story-telling skill to produce a novel which rewards you more the further you read.' Scotsman
The Book of Wishes and Complaints
(Winner of the Author's Club First Novel Award. Shortlisted for the David Higham prize for fiction)
Under the Communists, all Czech shops must keep a Book of Wishes and Complaints in which customers are invited to register their wishes (which will be ignored) and their complaints (which will be ignored). Such absurdity provides the central metaphor for this wonderful first novel of a young girl, Hana, struggling to make sense of a contradictory world.
When her father is arrested, Hana is taken in by the local physician, loyal party member Dr Cerny, at the behest of his wife, the formidable Nora, recently arrived from England. Growing up in a household of Earl Grey tea and Liquorice Allsorts, Marxist tracts and party politics, Hana eventually flees to England where her hopes and dreams of life in the West are finally put to the test.
From Reviews of The Book of Wishes and Complaints
'The Book of Wishes and Complaints is such an accomplished novel it disdains the description of debut. In it Zina Rohan unwraps the pain of Czechoslovakia with delicate fingers of irony.' Sunday Times
'Zina Rohan shuns the grand gestures of much writing about Stalin's Europe to concentrate on regular low-level doses of irony, insight and charm. That may sound like faint praise, but many novels with twice the pretensions of this one will fail to deliver half as much.' Observer
'Rohan shares Kundera's piercing sense of irony but adds her own brand of warmth and humanity. From start to finish The Book of Wishes and Complaints is a novel of admirable wit and clarity.' Times Literary Supplement
'A sympathetic and unusually matrue first novel which owes its life and realism to its author's ability to be both astute observer and compassionate insider, availing of some of the best elements of two literary traditions.' Irish Times
'Zina Rohan has a wonderful, often comic instinct for the everyday, the kind of domestic detail that tells us everything.' independent on Sunday
'Emotions are described with unnerving clarity and you become totally involved with Hana's dilemmas. Cleverly, Rohan denies us the Hollywood happy ending, offering us a question mark instead. A compelling first novel.' Time Out
'A fine and darkly humorous first novel.' Sunday Telegraph