Fugitive Pieces

Hugh Shurley (Jacket photograph) and David Laurenc New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. [6], 294, [4] pages. Signed by the author on the title page. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award and Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award. Anne Michaels (born 15 April 1958) is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honors. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for the screen in 2007. Her debut novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), offered Michaels the opportunity to work more expansively with complicated questions related to history, identity, location, and grief. With Fugitive Pieces, Michaels lays the thematic foundation of her future works, exploring the relationship between history and memory, and how we, as a people, remember. She also launches her meditation on "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of," and the paradoxical understanding that "there is nothing a man will not do to another; nothing a man will not do for another." This first novel from an award-winning poet -- a #1 best-seller in Canada -- is certain to propel her into the front ranks of our very best practitioners of contemporary fiction. Fugitive Pieces, the story of a holocaust survivor trying to find his way back into the world, went on to be critically acclaimed internationally, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Heritage Toronto Award of Merit, the Martin and Beatrice Fischer Award, the Harold Ribalow Award, the Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. It is a story of World War II as remembered and imagined by one of its survivors: a poet named Jakob Beer, traumatically orphaned as a young child and smuggled out of Poland, first to a Greek island (where he will return as an adult), and later to Toronto. It is the story of how, over his lifetime, Jakob learns the power of language -- to destroy, to omit, to obliterate, but also to restore and to conjure, witness and tell -- as he comes to understand and experience what was lost to him and of what is possible for him to regain. Profoundly moving, brilliantly written -- as sensual and lyric as it is emotionally resonant -- Fugitive Pieces delves into the most difficult workings of the human heart and mind: the grief and healing of remembrance. It is a first novel of astonishing achievement. Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: Jakob Beer, Jew, Refuge, WWII, Survival, Orphaned, Greece, Toronto, Canada, Language, Grief, Healing, Remembrance, Family History

ISBN: 067945439X

[Book #84171]

Price: $150.00

See all items in WWII
See all items by