Angelina's Children by Alice Ferney

'Originally published in France in 1997 and newly translated by Emily Read, this is a wonderfully rich novel of a people living on the outskirts of society… Award winning novel that is beautifully written.' - The Nottingham Evening Post

'Everything Angelina does is in the interest of genetic survival; she would, she admits, let her husband starve if it were the only way she could feed her children. It is her body that is ultimately consumed before the family is forced to move again. At the core of this clear-eyed, unsentimental story is unyielding muscle, concealed beneath layers of traditional clothing, a vitality the Romany must carry "locked within themselves.' - Washington Post

'Alternatively high-flown and gritty, this first US release from French author Ferney, begins with a cliché about Gypsy blood-‘a dark and vital flow that attracted women and fathered numberless children’-but as the book progresses, the Romanies rise rapidly above stereotype. All rests on a foundation of flinty detail: the broken glass that litters the campsite, the stench of the trash fire that warms Angelina’s family. In Ferney's hands, the romance of the Gypsies becomes a meditation on life's harsh unpredictability and the joy to be found in its midst.' - Publishers Week

'A beautifully feminine and fertile book… Ferney’s prose at its most powerful.' - Le Figaro

'A wonderful portrait of a woman both imperial and bruised, a greying ravaged mother-wolf that still controls all those around her. A novel of rhythm and grace, a beautiful voyage with the gypsies.' - Le Monde

'An extended family of gypsies into whose midst comes a visiting librarian form the basis for Alice Ferney’s beautiful, haunting novel Angelina’s Children. Winner of the French literary Prix Culture et Bibliotheques pour Tous, this book takes the reader into the heart of a community frequently seen only as problematic. Within the encampment, life is physically hard, and Ferney writes unsentimentally about the getting and nurturing of children and the hostility of and to outsiders. Yet Angelina’s Children is profoundly moving, life-affirming story which outclasses any of those ‘Baguettes in Bordeaux’ holiday reads so often marketed as true to French life.' - Glasgow Herald