The Boy Who Saw In Colours

Berlin, 1939. Josef is a young boy whose family has become a victim of the man he calls the moustached man. When the world around him turns frightening, he looks to the colours for guidance, as he has done before.

Josef is sent to a German school that discourages anything that makes a child different from the rest. Surrounded by that pressure to conform, he comes to understand that art is the only thing that lets him express himself at all.

The novel follows Josef through a child's upside-down view of Nazi Germany, and shows how Hitler hypnotised the minds of a generation. Josef's senses blur together: sounds have tastes and memories carry colours. That gives the narration a strongly sensory, imaginative texture, set against a regime that demands sameness.

This is historical fiction told from a child's point of view, and the tone is serious. It has won the Literary Titan Gold Book Award for Fiction and was a nominee for the BIBA Award for 2020. The subject is the way a nation was swayed, seen through one boy who perceives the world differently.