Zeno Was Here holds the twin distinctions of being the only book Jan had published on an adult list – Jonathan Cape, 1987, then Pan paperbacks, 1989 – and the only one she wrote without a contract.

From my interview with Jan about her work 1992:

I found it far harder to write about people my own age because what they did, how they did it, were so much closer – whereas the things that seemed to be incomprehensible when I was a child become rational when you look back at them. That’s the service an adult writer can do for a child: to clarify what the child cannot clarify for himself.

Here are links to reviews from Kirkus Review, on the book’s US publication, and also from Publishers Weekly. You might be interested to read Mick Gowar’s new essay about Jan’s poetry, which is deeply relevant to Zeno Was Here.