Jane Rogers – författare

“The novel does not set up an elaborate apocalypse, but astringently strips away the smears hiding the apocalypses we really face. Like Jessie’s, it is a small, calm voice of reason in a nonsensical world.” —The Independent

When Anne Harrington decides to return from her father''s burial by boat, she is advised strongly against it. The journey from Nigeria back to England is too long, she is warned: far better to return to her old routine as quickly as possible. But Anne is not quite alone: she has her father''s belongings, and more particularly, his diaries from his time in Africa. Many years earlier, Anne''s parents had made the opposite journey, arriving in Nigeria to run a mission in the east of the country. It was a time of new beginnings for her father, David, and her mother, Miriam, but also of great tensions: Miriam found local attitudes towards women restricting her role and her freedom; while David''s theological differences with his staff were to have wider and more serious repercussions. For Anne, meanwhile, the voyage home is not turning out to be the haven of solitude she is hoping for. Deep inside the ship, hidden among the containers, she discovers a pair of stowaways, desperate not to be discovered. And though Anne promises not to reveal their existence to the crew, if she does not find help, one of them may die ...

The island is a place where things are not quite as they appear; a magical place where the murder of a reclusive woman is not a cut and dried case.''I thought I had come to the island to wrest control of my life back from the woman who had sabotaged it. But I was wrong. My mother was still writing my plot.''Nikki Black, intent on punishing the mother who abandoned her at birth, goes to the island with only one aim in mind: revenge. But her plans are confounded by the discovery that she has a brother. Not just any brother but a brother strangely possessed by their mother; a brother with a terrifying violent streak; an apparent simpleton whose head is filled with the stories of past islanders, Crofters, Vikings, Little People. A brother whose dangerous love and strange way of seeing the world transform Nikki''s life.

Winner of the Writers'' Guild Best Fiction Book Award, 1996The year is 1788, the place New South Wales. Marine Lieutenant William Dawes has arrived in the Antipodes to build an observatory, reform the convicts and understand the Aborigines. He is a good man who will be subject to many temptations.In England, now, a child is born. His mother knows he has extraordinary powers; his father knows he is a helpless cripple. Olla, defending and nurturing her miraculous son, emerges as one of the strangest and most compelling characters of contemporary fiction.Jane Rogers intertwines the powerful dramas of the first year of the convict-colony with these present-day lives to make a rich and gripping novel.

In 1830, as the end of the world approached, the charismatic, hunchbacked prophet of a religious sect settled in Lancashire heeds the biblical injunction and chooses seven virgins ''for comfort and succour''. Basing her novel on the life of the real John Wroe, a leader of a group called the Christian Israelite Church, Rogers crafts an impeccable narrative, interweaving the diverse mindsets of some of the chosen women and the prophet during the nine months of complex interaction. Part morality tale, part history, packed with accurate details of early 19th century life, the stories of Leah, Joanna, Hannah and Martha unfold as they cope with the hypocrisy, blind beliefs and idealism of the sexually threatening prophet.Told with humour, irony and a generosity that embraces even the sinister Wroe, this is a compelling story of astonishing depth, elucidating religious idealism, the beginnings of socialism and the ubiquitous position of women as unpaid labourers.