Jakob's Colours by Lindsay Hawdon

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I'm finding some absolutely beautiful and also absolutely heartbreaking books in the library at the moment - this one, Jakob's Colours, was recommended by a friend, and is right up there with the best of them.

I am conscious that I've been using the word "beautiful" quite a lot in recent reviews, but just switching the word does not alter the fact that sometimes it is the best description. Jakob's Colours is beautifully written, and I adore the characters who inhabit its pages and the tiny cupboards within its walls. The Roma Holocaust - the Porajmos - is little-visited in literature, and rarely does any book telling the untellable do it with such devastating beauty.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

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And the Mountains Echoed is a beautifully written, intense, and accomplished novel, as you'd expect from the author of The Kite Runner and the even more splendid A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I did feel that I'd have liked to have spent more time with some of the characters at the heart of the novel, followed them in more detail over all the years they travelled in search of what was lost, but that's a testament to Hosseini's engagingly human characters and powerful storytelling in what is both a heartbreaking and an uplifting journey.