Jakob's Colours

Author(s): Lindsay Hawdon

Contemporary | Sarah

This heartbreaking and tender novel will appeal to readers who loved Sophie's Choice, Schindler's Ark and The Book Thief. 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 colour where there is no colour.

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Product Information

For readers who love Sophie's Choice, Schindler's Ark and The Book Thief, this heartbreaking and tender novel weaves back and forward in time and place between Austria during the Second World War, to 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.

Lindsay Hawdon writes fiction and travel. Her column An Englishwoman Abroad ran in the Sunday Telegraph for seven years. Throughout that time she travelled to every continent, writing stories about her experiences and the people she encountered along the way. Her blog for the Sunday Times called HAVE KIDS WILL TRAVEL followed a year's trip travelling solo with her two young boys through the Far East to Australia. She lives in Bath with her family.

General Fields

  • : 9781444797688
  • : Hodder & Stoughton General Division
  • : Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
  • : January 2015
  • : 22.90 cmmm X 15.20 cmmm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : April 2015
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : 320
  • : en
  • : 415
  • : Paperback
  • : Lindsay Hawdon