Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers (; ) is a collection of nineteen short stories by Yugoslav author Danilo Kià ¡.
The book is part of what Kià ¡ called his "family cycle" trilogy, consisting of the novels Garden, Ashes (1965), and Hourglass (1972). Though Early Sorrows was published after Garden, Ashes, it is effectively the first novel in the trilogy.
Early Sorrows is composed of vignettes about Andy Sam, a young Serbian boy who works as a cowherd to bring in money for his family. Andy spends most of the day reading.
Like much of Kià ¡'s work, Early Sorrows deals with the Holocaust. Andy's father, like Kià ¡'s own father, is sent to Auschwitz. Notably, it is the only work of Kià ¡'s in which he depicts a scene inside a concentration camp (Andy hallucinates about his relatives who were taken away by Nazis).