Jakob's Colours

For readers who love Sophie's Choice, Schindler's Ark, and The Book Thief, this heartbreaking and tender novel weaves back and forth between World War II Austria, to Switzerland and 1920s England, to tell the interlinked stories of an 8-year-old gypsy boy and his parents

Austria, 1944. Jakob, a gypsy boy—half Roma, half Yenish—runs, as he has been told to do, with shoes of sack cloth, still bloodstained with another's blood, a stone clutched in one hand, a small wooden box in the other. He runs blindly, full of fear, empty of hope. For hope lies behind him in a green field with a tree that stands shaped like a Y. He knows how to read the land, the sky. When to seek shelter, when not. He has grown up directing himself with the wind and the shadows. They are familiar to him. It is the loneliness that is not. He has never, until this time, been so alone. "Don't be afraid, Jakob," his father has told him, his voice weak and wavering. "See the colours, my boy," he has whispered. So he does. Rusted ochre from a mossy bough. Steely white from the sap of the youngest tree. On and on, Jakob runs. Spanning from one world war to another, taking us across England, Switzerland, and Austria, Jakob's Colours is about the painful legacies passed down from one generation to another, finding hope where there is no hope and color where there is no color.