About the book: His Wife (2022) is based on true events: it is about a woman who was deceived and mentally and physically abused, and who, at one point in her life, learns that the father of her two children is accused of raping an underage girl during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Even though the names of characters have been changed in order to protect the identities of certain individuals, this remains a story of a Turkish girl's sincere love for a Bosniak, who is at all costs trying to avoid the punishment for his crimes.
"My name is Zehra Ozdemir. I am a religious woman, a Muslim. I carry both heaven and hell within me. I am a beloved mother to my children and a dead ally to my devil. I'm protecting my child, yet killing someone else's, by keeping some terrible happenings a secret because I am ashamed of the horrid truth. I try to convince people of the verity of the life I seemingly lead, but at times I myself cannot tell a lie from the truth."
"Every one of us gets one chance at life and no one has the right to take it away from us. And one more thing: no one should walk alone. All sins have come to be collected, and in the end, everything boils down to life and death. It was tense and scary: an unusual story of life, repentance and death, and in the background, all of human sins followed by the extinction of life."
"Every third woman in the world is a victim of violence, and in Bosnia, every 10 minutes, a woman is being abused. These data are not complete - the numbers are much higher since most of these cases remain unregistered. Some women do not want to admit this 'disgrace' for fear that they will not be able to walk the same paths as they used to. 25 November 2011 was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women."
About the author: Marijana Dokoza was born in 1978 in Zadar, Croatia. She is a writer and a journalist and has worked in numerous Croatian media. She is currently living in Mainz, Germany. She is the editor of the Croatian emigration periodical Fenix Magazine and a member of the Croatian Cultural Community of Mainz and the German-Croatian Society of Mainz. She is the author of 3 poetry books and five novels in Croatian. Two of her fie novels reached bestseller status in Croatia in a very short time, and one of them was nominated for the Croatian literary award Kiklop in the year it was published. She is the winner of the Croatian Women of Influence Award which is given by The Croatian Women's Network in Toronto. In 2016, she was listed among 25 most successful women of migrant origin residing in Mainz. She also writes poems, in both Croatian and English, that are set to music.
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