Zoli - Hardcover

A great book and a marvellously crafted story. I loved the different angles, the images and the depiction of the Roma. This is life without being sentimental or defensive. (Roddy Doyle)

¿If a writer's highest calling is to imagine what it is to be ¿other¿, then Colum McCann is a giant amongst us - fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath¿ (Peter Carey)

¿I review a great many Roma-themed manuscripts for publishers, but none has ever moved me as profoundly as the haunting story of Zoli. With its stark imagery it takes one deep into the heart of World War II Europe¿ (Ian Hancock Director of Romani Archives, Universtiy of Texas)

Zoli is an assiduously crafted and beautifully haunting story of Europe from one of Ireland's very best novelists. Every book from Colum Mc Cann extends his range and excavates new territories. He is an audacious and wonderfully skilled writer (Joseph O'Connor)

McCann's strongest suit is his brilliant ability to recreate a remote world and era...a worthy addition to the growing literature of Roma life. (Michael Arditti DAILY MAIL (8.9.06))

It is here that McCann's novel transcends its surface manifestation as an historical novel and reveals itself for what it is - an unblinking meditation on the significance, value and challenge of cultural diversity. It is a novel about now and here, about how we cope - or fail to cope - with the others or Others in our midst....McCann's novel is a rare feat (Gerry Dukes IRISH INDEPENDENT (9.9.06))

This is a haunting and lyrical story, well written and researched. (TIMES (9.9.06))

This beautifully written, heartfelt book is both compelling and moving from start to finish; a true page-turner that is unafraid to face the darker sides of life while evoking the joys and kindnesses that surprise and sustain us all. (WATERSTONE'S BOOKS QUARTERLY)

McCann intelligently poses complicated questions about immigration and identity that are deeply relevant today. His prose is sharp and scintillatingly sensual, and the final moment in which Zolo finally rediscovers herself is incontrovertibly moving...[a] beautiful, thoughtful novel. (Ed Wood INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY (17.9.06))

McCann is as fine, and persuasive, a storyteller as any other working in English today...Much more could be said about the beauty and subtle judgement of this, McCann's finest novel, but what emerges most powerfully is a sense of compassion, even identification, with a people, who, because of the stories told about them, only need appear on a country road to inspire hatred and fear from their fellow man. (John Burnside THE SCOTSMAN (16.9.06))

The novel begins in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s when Zoli, a young Roma girl, is six years old. The fascist Hlinka guards had driven most of her people out onto the frozen lake and forced them to stay there until the spring, when the ice cracked and everyone drowned - Zoli's parents, brothers and sisters. Now she and her grandfather head off in search of a 'company'. Zoli teaches herself to read and write and becomes a singer, a privileged position in a gypsy company as they are viewed as the guardians of gypsy tradition. But Zoli is different because she secretly writes down some of her songs. With the rise of the Nazis, the suppression of the gypsies intensifies. The war ends when Zoli is 16 and with the spread of socialism, the Roma are suddenly regarded as 'comrades' again. Zoli meets Stephen Swann, a man she will have a passionate affair with, but who will also betray her. He persuades Zoli to publish some of her work. But when the government try to use Zoli to help them in their plan to 'settle' gypsies, her community turns against her. They condemn her to 'Pollution for Life', which means she is exiled forever. She begins a journey that will eventually lead her to Italy and a new life. Zoli is based very loosely on the true story of the Gypsy poet, Papsuza, who was sentenced to a Life of Pollution by her fellow Roma when a Polish intellectual published her poems. But Colum has turned this into so much more - it's a brilliantly written work that brings the culture and the time to life, an incredibly rich story about betrayal and redemption, and storytelling in all its guises.