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.