Sweeping us into the world of the Roma as fascims gathers force and the Holocaust looms on the horizon, The Color of Smoke is a captivating story, that abounds in unforgettable characters. Its adolescent narrator is 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 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, one with haunting implications for today.