Title: "Zoli"
Author: by Colum McCann
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 333
Price: $24.95
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In a nutshell: Zoli Novotna is the poet and protagonist in this passionate Gypsy novel set in 1930s Czechoslovakia. The heroine secretly learns to read and write while her people frown on it. When her poetry is published, she becomes a cultural phenomenon but is knocked off her pedestal when the new Communist government uses her for its own purposes. And her people cruelly banish her from their society. McCann burrows deeply into the Roma society and tells a powerful story of an almost unknown group.