Fugitive Pieces - (Vintage International) by Anne Michaels (Paperback)

About the Book

Published to rapturous acclaim, this fiercely concentrated and beautifully written novel tells the story of a Polish Jew who, at the age of seven, after seeing his parents murdered by the Nazis, is resurrected by a Greek scientist, and transformed from a half-wild survivor into a scholar and translator who extracts meaning from the unfathomable horror of our time.

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award

In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.

As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.

Review Quotes

"Extraordinarily magical." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Lovely...musical and magical.... Put this book alongside The English Patient." --Chicago Tribune

"Word by blessed word, it is a gorgeously written book: aflame with the subzero cold of history and the passions of emotional comprehension." --Boston Globe

"Fugitive Pieces deserves to become a classic." --San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Anne Michaels teaches creative writing in Toronto. Her two collections of poetry are The Weight of Oranges (1986), which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, and Miner's Pond (1991), which received the Canadian Authors Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award. Fugitive Pieces is her first novel.