num_pages: 294
description: Anne Michaels, an accomplished poet, has already published two collections of poetry in her native Canada. She turns her hand to fiction in an impressive debut novel, Fugitive Pieces. 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. 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. After the war they emigrated together to Canada. 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.  Fugitive Pieces is a book about memory and forgetting. 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.
language: English
title: Fugitive Pieces
titlecomplete: Fugitive Pieces
genres: Fiction, Historical, War, Canada, Literature, Holocaust, Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, World War II
ratings_count: 15997
awards: awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Guardian Fiction Award, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Scotiabank Giller Prize, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Premio letterario Giuseppe Acerbi, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Trillium Book Award, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: Bloomsbury