Gypsy Boy: inside the mysterious and violent world of gypsies

For centuries members of the ethnic group known as the Roma (and their counterparts, the Irish Travellers) have been persecuted, maligned, and literally "run out of town" time and again as accused scam artists, sleazy fortune tellers and shoddy home contractors. "Gypsy" is the epithet thrust their way, and it's a term some Romany Gypsies find pejorative but others embrace with pride, even as some embrace the bling-obsessed party life society ascribes to them.

Certainly the media play a role here, promoting such damaging stereotypes as the norm through vehicles like the TV documentary series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding on the UK's Channel 4. Wedding proved such a hit that the US network TLC picked it up last summer, going so far as to customise its own American narration over the series' voyeuristic images of Irish Gypsy teen brides in bouffant hairdos, tiaras, and over-the-top dresses (weighing more than 30kg and even lighting up in the dark).

Now comes another shocking account of the Roma successful enough in Britain to make the leap to the international stage. Gypsy Boy: One Boy's Struggle to Escape from a Secret World, already a best-selling memoir in the UK, makes its debut on the other side of the Atlantic this month together with a new title, Gypsy Boy: My Life in the Secret World of the Romany Gypsies.

Yet unlike the TV series, the book is a sobering and compelling portrait of Gypsy life that is written by an insider. This particular portrait is also somewhat terrifying: if Gypsy Boy's author is to be believed, Roma and Traveller caravan camps such as the ones he grew up in, in Berkshire and Nottinghamshire, are steeped in violence, the systemic abuse of women and thievery against "grunters", or "Gorgia" (non-Gypsy)