Out now in paperback - Jakob's Colours

    

    Lindsay's Hawdon's debut novel Jakob's Colours is a superb piece of work and a heart-rending one. It's out today in paperback and really does deserve a wide readership, for its quality and its subject matter. It deals with an overlooked aspect of twentieth century history, the persecution of Europe's Roma people which culminated in death camps and genocide, and it follows Jakob, a young half-blood gypsy boy, his Roma father and his English mother, and moves from Jakob's flight from the Nazi net in 1944 back to his parents' earlier lives in the '30s.

    When I reviewed it last year I summed up thus:

    "A novel of great beauty, compassion and sensitivity which yet portrays man’s inhumanity to man at its very worst, the book’s episodic structure - taking the reader back and forth in time and place - adds to its intensity, while Lindsay Hawdon’s gift for language makes for luminous, affecting writing."

Comments

[Dark Puss]

I am surprised to see you say this book deals with an overlooked aspect of the C20 fascist inspired genocide as I thought it was well known. However that comment (reflecting as usual my ignorance) does not of course in any way detract from your review.

[Cornflower]

Overlooked to the extent that it has had, certainly as far as I am aware, much less 'coverage' in books and film than the persecution of the Jewish people.

[Dark Puss]

As I say, my comment reflects my ignorance I suspect; perhaps I have had a deeper interest in Roma culture than many other people.

[LizF]

I currently have the hardback version of this in my library pile - better read it sooner rather than later as the release of the paperback version usually brings a lot of requests and it has been on my want-to-read list since it first came out.