Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels

Written by Anne Michaels
Read by Peter Marinker
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: December 15, 2013
Duration: 09:17:25

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. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption. As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss.

Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.

“Marinker’s voice is gentle, his delivery precise and sensuous. He makes you aware of the weight of each word, aware that the author–a Canadian poet–has made deliberate selections. Her first novel is very much about language and about memory, its ability to sear, to heal, but most of all, to transform. The story concerns a Polish-Jewish child, Jakob Beer, who witnesses the murder of his family at the hands of the Nazis, and his rescue by Athos, a Greek geologist, who secrets the boy to his Greek island. Under Athos’s infinitely humane tutelage, Jakob will learn the redemptive power of love. Fugitive Pieces is a difficult, layered novel, which doesn’t follow a strict narrative path. That’s why Marinker’s reading, passionate but measured, is so effective, forever keeping the listener in the moment.”—AudioFile