The Color of Smoke

Sweeping us into the world of the roma as fascism gathers force and the Holocaust looms on the horizon, The Color of Smoke is a thoroughly absorbing story that abounds in unforgettable characters. There is the adolescent narrator, torn between his people and a society that both entices him and rejects him. From his rise in school to his first sexual encounters, from hunger to police harassment, he treads a precarious path--one marked by moments of beauty and poignancy along with bawdiness, violence, and high adventure. And we come to know a people bound as much by a rich moral fabric as by the land and by the horses they love.

By an author who himself came of age in a Romani settlement during World War II, The Color of Smoke is a must read for anyone seeking a stunningly new, authoritative window onto the lives of the dispossessed--with haunting implications for today.Magisterial in scope and yet intensely personal, it combines beautiful prose with profound reflections on the human condition as only great literature can.