Fugitive Pieces

The prize-winning, bestselling debut novel from Anne Michaels, reissued with a striking new cover.

A young boy, Jakob Beer, is rescued from the muddy ruins of a buried Polish village in Nazi-occupied Poland, during the Second World War. Of his family, he is the only one who has survived. He is smuggled out to an island in Greece by an unlikely saviour, the scientist and humanist Athos Roussos. There, in the seclusion and tenderness of Athos's house, they spend the last years of the Occupation in a precarious refuge made lavish with poetry and cartography, botany and art.

In the novel's second part, Ben, a young professor and an expert in the drama of weather and biography, meets the now sixty-year-old Jacob and his ardent and glorious Michaela at the home of a mutual friend. The quiet elation Ben senses in the older man, and Ben's own connection to the wounding legacies of the war, kindle a fascination with Jakob and his writing, disturbing the safety of his carefully ordered world.

A novel of astounding beauty and wisdom, Fugitive Pieces.

Author Biography: Anne Michaels' book, Poems, published in 2000, includes three collections of poetry: The Weight of Oranges, which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas; Miner's Pond, which won the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award; and Skin Divers. Fugitive Pieces was originally published by Bloomsbury in 1997 to worldwide critical acclaim. It won the Orange Prize and the Trillium Award among others, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award. It was also made into a major motion picture. Anne Michaels has also composed music for the theatre. Born in 1958, Anne Michaels lives in Toronto.