When Zara Keff is evacuated from London to Cambridgeshire in 1940, her extended family goes along too.

A model pupil, Zara relishes being in the thick of the local war effort, winning her school a prize for her tireless efforts on the home front. When tales of the suffering inflicted in occupied Europe begin to emerge, she is as horrified as any of her classmates. That horror is compounded by a shocking chance discovery, for Zara is not quite who she thinks she is.

A tender, thought-provoking book about love, lies, and identity, it weaves the complex tale of the century itself through the lifetime of Zara Keff.

Jeremy Waxman started his career in education as a history teacher and later became a headteacher of schools in Yorkshire and London. He was awarded an OBE for services to education in 2006. Jeremy retired to Canterbury in 2017 and now pursues his enthusiasms for writing, travelling, film, jazz, cricket, and Tottenham Hotspur.

Jeremy explains: “My inspiration for “The Century of Zara Keff” came from two sources. One was personal, for, although the vast majority of the novel is fictional, it’s to an extent memoire-based, and events flow from my mother’s experience during wartime. The other was historical: I taught modern history for much of my career.

Firstly, then, the young Zara. Evacuated from north London to Cambridgeshire, she has the time of her life. She throws herself into the various activities of the “Home Front”, winning her junior school a prize for her efforts. Moving up to the Cambridge and County Girls School, the prospects for post-war womanhood beckon. Zara learns of the suffering inflicted in occupied Europe, and feels great pity for the victims, but is determined to help make the world a better place. Yet she returns to Stoke Newington to discover that she’s Jewish.

Secondly, there’s the notion that one can be up against the times one lives in. I had this idea that the 20 th Century could be anthropomorphised as the antagonist in the novel. I’m an admirer of the late Eric Hobsbawm, and my emeritus professor is inspired by him. It’s through him that the Century is given its own voice in the book. Indeed, Eric was known for his “naming” of centuries, coining the phrases, “the long nineteenth” and “the short twentieth”.

“The Century of Zara Keff” is the title that Zara gives to a composition, imagining the future, that she is asked to produce at junior school. The novel plays the youthful optimism of her writing against the reality the twentieth century brings – and explores the legacy of the tension between them hands down.”

RELEASE DATE: 28/01/2025 ISBN: 9781835741214 Price: £9.99