Austria, 1944. Jakob, a gypsy boy--half Roma, half Yenish--runs for his life as he has been told to do. With shoes made of sack cloth--stained with another person's blood--and a stone clutched in one hand, a small wooden box in the other, he runs blindly, full of fear and nearly drained of hope.
He knows when to trust a stranger and when to be wary. He knows how to read the land and the sky--when to seek shelter, when not to. He has grown up following the wind and sticking to the shadows. They are familiar to him. It is the loneliness that is new. He has never, until now, been so alone.
Weaving back and forth in time and place between WWII Austria, Switzerland, and 1920s England to tell the interlinked stories of Jakob, an 8-year-old gypsy boy, his father Yavy, and his English mother Lor, Jakob's Colors is about the painful legacies passed down from one generation to another, finding hope when there is no hope and color where there is no color.
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I thought it was a remarkable book--brave, bighearted, and beautifully written. Harrowing too, of course, at times almost unbearably so, but Lindsay Hawdon meets the material with such honesty and courage we, as readers, can stay with it without feeling crushed by it. It's a first novel that clearly announces the arrival of a very talented writer.
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Andrew Miller, author of Pure