Lindsay Hawdon (http://lhawdon.co.uk/www.lhawdon.co.uk/Home.html) is a writer of travel, adventure and fiction. She began travelling at the age of eighteen. After leaving school, she spent three years roaming around Europe, Africa and India. Her travel column, An Englishwoman Abroad, began in The Sunday Telegraph in 2000 and ran for seven years. Jakob’s Colours is her latest novel. The setting is Austria in 1944. Eight year old Jakob, a gypsy boy-half Roma, half Yenish, runs as he has been told. With shoes made 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 and nearly drained of hope. He knows when to trust a stranger and when to be wary. He knows how to read the land and the sky – when to seek shelter, when not to. He has grown up following the wind and sticking to the shadows. They are familiar to him. Loneliness is constant companion.
This tale weaves back and forth in time and place between Austria and Switzerland during World War II, and 1920s England. It tells the interlinked stories of Jakob, his father Yavy, and his English mother Lor. It is about the painful legacies passed down from one generation to another, finding hope where there is no hope and colour where there seems only to be a world drained of colour.
Enquire at your local library or consult http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jakobs-Colours-Lindsay-Hawdon/dp/1444797670/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432196200&sr=1-1&keywords=jakobs+colours for full bibliographic details.
320 pages in Hodder & Stoughton
First published 9 April 2015
ISBN 978-1444797671
Lindsay Hawdon