… It mends the hopeless and dances with loss. “This extraordinarily beautiful novel is a world. There is much to admire in Fugitive Pieces.”

“A story with considerable innate power…. This first novel at once seizes its place among the literature of the Holocaust.” Fugitive Pieces is a novel eminently worth reading.” “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.” “Michaels writes with exquisite sensitivity about the psyches of survivors … an extraordinarily wise book.” “Michaels’s prose does not race it hovers, insinuating itself in and around timeless mysteries.” The richness and ambition of Michaels’s work mark it as an important contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.” How is it possible to love the living when our hearts are still with the dead? What is the difference between what historical fact tells us and what we remember? More than that, the novel is a meditation on the power of language to free our souls and allow us to find our own destinies.'.“A bold and beautiful novel…. Fugitive Pieces is a book about memory and forgetting. Jakob's story is told through diaries discovered by Ben, a young man whose parents are Holocaust survivors and who is a vessel for their memories just as Jakob is the bearer of his own.

After the war they emigrated together to Canada. Beer himself was found and smuggled out of Poland by Athos Roussos, a Greek archaeologist who carried him back to Greece and kept him there in precarious safety. This is the story of Jakob Beer, a Polish Jew, translator, and poet who, as a child, witnessed his family's slaughter at the hands of the Nazis. She turns her hand to fiction in an impressive debut novel, Fugitive Pieces. Review: Anne Michaels, an accomplished poet, has already published two collections of poetry in her native Canada. With its vivid evocation of landscape and character, its unique excavation of memory and time, it is a wholly unforgettable novel that draws us into the lives of its characters with compassion and recognition. Fugitive Pieces is a work of rare vision that is at once lyrical, sensual, profound. 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. It is here that his loss gradually surfaces, as does the haunting question of his sisters fate. 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 wars end, to Toronto.

'Anne Michaels spellbinding début novel has quickly become one of the most beloved and talked-about books of the decade.

Fugitive pieces