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. Also available in Flamingo: 'The Book of Wishes and Complaints' '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