Little Money Street ─ In Search of Gypsies and Thier Music in the South of France

In 1998, Eberstadt and her family moved from New York to Perpignan, France, a city with one of the largest Gypsy populations in Western Europe. Always fascinated with Gypsy music, Eberstadt became obsessed with a local band called Tekameli, perhaps the greatest Gypsy band between Barcelona and Budapest. After eighteen futile months, she was at last invited into the home of Tekameli's lead singer, Moeise Espinas. Here she found a jealously guarded culture--a society made, in part, of lawlessness and defiance of non-Gypsy norms--that nonetheless made room for her, "a privileged American in a Mediterranean underworld." As her relationship with the Espinas family changed over the years from mutual bafflement to friendship, Eberstadt found herself a part of Gypsy life, moving about in a large group--at cockfights, in storefront churches, at malls, in homes, and at rehearsals, discovering lives lived "between biblical laws and strip-mall consumerism."--From publisher description.

Fernanda Eberstadt is the author of four novels: The Furies, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, Low Tide, and Isaac and
His Devils. She graduated from Brearley in New York City and from Magdalen College, Oxford. She lives in France with her husband and two children.