Jakob's Colors - Hardcover

""Jakob's Colors" reduced me to tears. I loved its hypnotic, rhapsodic quality and can't shake it from my mind." "Sarah Vaughan, author of "The Art of Baking Blind"
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"Memory fuels a boy's passage through wartime Austria." ""The New York Times"""

Longlisted for the Best First Novel Award, 2016
"Memory fuels a boy's passage through wartime Austria." ""The New York Times"""

Longlisted for the Best First Novel Award, 2016
"Memory fuels a boy's passage through wartime Austria."--The New York Times

"One of the best debuts of the year . . . Hawdon brings a fresh (and heartbreaking) perspective to the Second World War as she follows a family of Romany gypsies."--Elle (UK)

"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."
--Andrew Miller, author of Pure


"This is a book you will remember long after you have finished it."-- Historical Novel Review


"This is a heartbreaking love story . . . Writing with passion and poetry, Lindsay Hawdon brings astonishing color and life to an episode of unremitting darkness and despair. I honestly believe it stands comparison with D.M. Thomas's classic The White Hotel."--Rory Clements, bestselling author of the John Shakespeare spy thrillers

"An impressive, heartfelt debut--a book about the power of stories to sustain us and drive us forward. It reminded me of Patrick Suskind's Perfume, but with colors in place of scents."--Aly Monroe, author of the Ellis Peters Historical Award-winner Icelight


"A stirring, finely observed tale that recalls the less fantastical parts of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and deserves its place alongside other notable Holocaust stories."--Library Journal

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.