Cloud the Color of Skin

When a fire at Zagreb’s Three Palms café tragically takes the life of the owner’s son, everyone joins the search for a culprit. And there can only be one: the young Roma man—Enis—employed as a waiter at the café. With all eyes on him, Enis is forced to flee, his face looming large on the front page of every newspaper and channel. The only place where he can think to take refuge is in Bosnia, in the settlement where his estranged father lives. Meanwhile, the event, which coincides with the outbreak of the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, draws a crowd to surround the Roma settlement in Zagreb, turning it into a ghetto. The protesters blame the Roma collectively, seeing danger in their differences. Weaving between Zagreb and Bosnia, between past and present, between a Roma ghetto in the heart of Zagreb and the lesser-known ghettos of the Roma Holocaust (or Porajmos), and between an imagined better life and the blaring trumpets of war in reality, Nebojša Lujanović’s Cloud the Color of Skin tells a story of guilt and justice, victimhood and violence, peacetime and war—and the Roma in the midst of it all. Nebojša Lujanović was born in 1981 in Novi Travnik (Bosnia and Herzegovina). He is a writer, scholar, and assistant professor at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek. He studied political science, sociology, and comparative literature at the University of Zagreb, where he received his doctorate in 2012 in the field of literary theory. His novels include Stakleno oko (Glass Eye, 2007), Godina svinje (Year of the Pig, 2010), Orgulje iz Waldsassena (The Organ of Waldsassen, 2011), Oblak boje kože (Cloud the Color of Skin, 2015), Južina (Sirocco, 2019), Maratonac (The Marathoner, 2020) and Tvornica Hrvata (The Croatian Factory, 2023), which was chosen by VBZ publishing house as best un­published manuscript. He is the author of the short story collection S pogrebnom povorkom nizbrdo (With the Funeral Procession Down the Hill, 2008), a creative writing manual called Autopsija teksta (Autopsy of the Text, 2016), and a scholarly book on Croatian literature called A Space of Dissent: From Ideology and Identity, to the Literary Field (2018). In addition to his novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and children’s book, he is the author of more than thirty academic papers, published locally and internationally. Aside from his work as a writer, scholar, and teacher, Lujanović is an avid runner. As a member of the Marathon Club Marjan, he has completed some fifteen marathons in as many years across Europe. He lives in Split, with his wife and children Lovre and Loti.