Anne Michaels - Fugitive Pieces

Winner of the
Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Guardian Fiction Award
Orange Prize
Trillium Award
Jewish Book Award
City of Toronto Book Award

A bold and beautiful novel. The richness and ambition of Michaelss work mark it as an important contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.

Washington Post Book World

Michaelss prose does not race; it hovers, insinuating itself in and around timeless mysteries.

Time

Michaels writes with exquisite sensitivity about the psyches of survivors an extraordinarily wise book.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Perhaps only a poet could venture the brutal beauty involved in setting up a dialogue between the extremes of horror and glory in Western civilization.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Beautiful. Michaels is extraordinarily gifted. Fugitive Pieces is a novel eminently worth reading.

Hungry Mind Review

Sublime. This first novel at once seizes its place among the literature of the Holocaust.

The Baltimore Sun

A most remarkable first novel.

The Detroit Free Press

A story with considerable innate power. There is much to admire in Fugitive Pieces.

The Wall Street Journal

This extraordinarily beautiful novel is a world. It mends the hopeless and dances with loss. Trust it and read it.

John Berger

Anne Michaels has created a world of stunning, heartbreaking clarity where even the unspeakable is captured in the light-web of her words. She is a superb poet, a breath-stop ping storyteller.

Cristina Garcia

Utterly mesmerizing. It does what all great novels do: illumine through the lights of language and intelligence the heart of a hitherto hidden human landscape.

Chaim Potok

Searing the mind with stunning images while seducing with radiant prose this novel will make readers yearn to share it with others, to read sentences and entire passages out loud, to debate its message, to acknowledge its wisdom.

Publishers Weekly

A poetic masterpiece of loss and redemption.

The Forward

Elegiac and redemptive beautifully written and quietly forceful. It is above all a healing argument for the healing power of words.

Salon

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 cant imagine a better novel being pub lished this year.

Independent (London)

This novel is an extraordinary piece of work.

Guardian (London)

Anne Michaels
FUGITIVE PIECES

Anne Michaelss two collections of poetry are The Weight of Oranges, which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, and Miners Pond, which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was short-listed for the Governor Generals Award and the Trillium Award. Fugitive Pieces is her first novel. Anne Michaels teaches creative writing in Toronto.

Also by Anne Michaels
POETRY
Miners Pond
The Weight of Oranges

for J

D uring the Second World War, countless manuscriptsdiaries, memoirs, eyewitness accountswere lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hiddenburied in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floorsby those who did not live to retrieve them.

Other stories are concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken. Still others are recovered, by circumstance alone.

Poet Jakob Beer, who was also a translator of posthumous writing from the war, was struck and killed by a car in Athens in the spring of 1993, at age sixty. His wife had been standing with him on the sidewalk; she survived her husband by two days. They had no children.

Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. A mans experience of war, he once wrote, never ends with the war. A mans work, like his life, is never completed.