Fugitive Pieces [Paperback]

'This is a novel to lose yourself in; let the language pour over you, depositing its richness like waves lapping sand onto a beach. Michaels is a novelist of unusual and compelling power' The Times 'All but a handful of contemporary novels are dwarfed by its reach, its compassion, its wisdom This is a book to read many times. I simply can't imagine a better being published this year' Independent

'Monumental Fugitive Pieces is the most important book I have read for forty years' John Berger, Observer 'This is a novel to lose yourself in; let the language pour over you, depositing its richness like waves lapping sand onto a beach. Michaels is a novelist of unusual and compelling power' The Times 'This is a book to read many times. I simply can't imagine a better being published this year' Independent 'A powerful novel of history, loss, love and exile It would not be easy to find a modern novel to match this one for line-by-line beauty' Independent on Sunday --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

It is just months before the Nazi occupation of Poland, and, from the mud of a buried city, Jakob Beer, an orphaned Jewish boy, finds himself rescued by an unlikely saviour. He is saved by the geologist and humanist Athos Roussos, who takes him to his Greek island home where he becomes his student. But the trauma of Jakob's early life refuses to leave him. Living forever in the shadow of the Holocaust, although Jakob has escaped the most terrible fate of all, he must yet steel himself to excavate the horrors of his own history.

Prize Winner
Fugitive Pieces won the 1997 Orange prize for Fiction. John Berger said: 'The most important, beautifully important book I have read for forty years....' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Athos said: ‘I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage sponsor for you and your sons…’

Athos said: ‘We must carry each other. If we don't have this , what are we?’

On the island of Zakynthos, Athos – scientist, scholar, middling master of languages – performed his most outstanding feat. From out of his trousers he plucked seven-year-old Jakob Beer.

Rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city after the murder of his parents by Nazi soldiers and the disappearance of his beloved sister, Bella, Jakob spends the last years of his childhood in hiding, for the Greek island Athos takes him to is also occupied by the Germans. But Athos gives him a realm to inhabit that is as big as the globe, as expansive as time, filling the child's mind with poetry and botany, history and travel.

Michaels' lyrical evocation of loss and love begins with the story of Jakob and ends nearly sixty years later when Ben, a young professor whose own connection to the agony of the Holocaust has shaped his world, discovers in Jakob's journals the truth that is life itself… 'Fugitive Pieces' is a novel to pierce the soul, rich with the music of words never wasted.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Anne Michaels is an award-winning poet and novelist. She lives in Toronto. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.