Fugitive Pieces

Anne Michaels's fiercely beautiful debut novel tells the interlocking stories of three men of different generations whose lives are transformed by the events and shifting effects of the same war. 

"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

As a young boy during the Second World War, Jakob Beer is rescued from the mud in Poland by an unlikely saviour, the scientist Athos Roussos, and he is taken to Greece, then, at war’s end, to Toronto. It is here that his loss gradually surfaces, as does the haunting question of his sister’s fate. Later in life, as a translator and a poet, and now with the glorious Michaela, Jakob meets Ben, a young professor whose own legacies of the war kindle within him a fascination with the older man and his writing.

"A moving tale of survival becomes a grave and stately hymn to the revivifying qualities of language and learning in this impressive debut by a Canadian poet... A stunning work, quite beautifully written, and a lovely homage to the imperilled yet indomitable culture and individuals it celebrates."  -  Kirkus Reviews

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.

Fugitive Pieces is a work of rare vision that is at once lyrical, sensual, and profound. With its vivid evocation of landscape and character and its unique excavation of memory and time, it is a wholly unforgettable novel, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.