‍Spotlight on Rob Gittins

‍It’s a challenge for me as an author with a new pen name to gain visibility so I’m grateful to several talented and respected authors – some I know personally; some I don’t know at all – who provided wonderful early reviews of An Ordinary House.

‍As a thank you to them for taking time out of their busy schedules to read and write about my book, I’m featuring each author on my blog with a spotlight on their work.

‍Rob Gittins is one of the UK’s leading screenwriters, having written numerous top-rated network UK TV shows, including Casualty, The Bill, Emmerdale, Stella, Vera, Heartbeat, Soldier Soldier and The Story of Tracy Beaker.

‍He is the longest serving writer currently working on Eastenders and has written over three hundred and fifty episodes of the programme. In 2015, he received an Outstanding Achievement Award for his work on the show.

‍Rob has story-lined over two thousand episodes of the popular daily Welsh drama serial Pobol Y Cwm (People of the Valley). For BBC Radio 4, he has written thirty original radio plays and more than a hundred episodes of The Archers.

‍He is also a novelist. His twelfth novel, Year Zero, published by Hobeck Books, is a post-World War Two historical spy thriller.

‍Year Zero by Rob Gittins

Berlin. May 1945. A city without institutions in a continent that has become a wasteland.

Thousands of former Nazis have been incarcerated in the very concentration camps they themselves established. One of those former Nazis is actually a British spy, Edward Kayne, who has intercepted a top-secret document that British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, insists is vital to settling the peace.

Martin Geller is tasked with recovering Kayne. Geller’s daughter, Zaya, was abducted two years before as part of the Lebensborn programme – the kidnapping of children deemed to be ripe for ‘Germanisation’. Zaya is now in the same camp.

Geller sets off on a two-pronged mission – to extract Kayne and rescue Zaya. But Geller will discover that far from settling the peace, the document that Kayne has intercepted threatens the opposite.

Can Geller save his daughter from the gates of hell? And how does Geller reconcile the rescue of Kayne with his knowledge that he may be condemning the world to a new Armageddon?

‍Rob’s other novels include:

‍ ‍Private Investigations