Fugitive Pieces

Product Description [MP3-CD audiobook format in Vinyl case. NOTE: The MP3-CD format requires a compatible audio CD player.] [Read by Peter Marinker] 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. -- 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 he has been 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. Review ''This extraordinarily beautiful novel is a world. A book miraculously created because it mends the hopeless and dances with loss. Trust and read it.'' --John Berger, Book Prize-winning author ''Anne Michaels has created a world of stunning, heartbreaking clarity where even the unspeakable is captured in the light-web of her words. She is a superb poet, a breath-stopping storyteller.'' --Cristina Garcia, National Book Award-winning author ''Fugitive Pieces is an utterly mesmerizing novel told from the core of a poet's soul focusing upon our very prosaic world. It does what all great novels do: illuminate through the lights of language and intelligence the heart of a hitherto hidden human landscape.'' --Chaim Potok, National Jewish Book Award-winning author ''Extraordinarily magical.'' --New York Times ''Lovely . . . musical and magical . . . Put this book alongside The English Patient.'' --Chicago Tribune''Word by blessed word, it is a gorgeously written book: aflame with the subzero cold of history and the passions of emotional comprehension.'' --Boston Globe ''Fugitive Pieces deserves to become a classic.'' --San Francisco Chronicle ''A story with considerable innate power . . . There is much to admire in Fugitive Pieces.'' --Wall Street Journal ''All except a handful of contemporary novels are dwarfed by its reach, its compassion, its wisdom . . . This is a book to read many times.'' --Independent (London) ''An extraordinary piece of work.'' --Guardian (London) ''Elegiac and redemptive . . . beautifully written and quietly forceful . . . It is above all a healing argument for the healing power of words.'' --Salon''There are times when the novel's reflections become as piercing and unsettling as the deep wisdom of saints and visionaries...Moments like this -- and they are frequent -- imbue the novel with a rare and strange and sometimes eerie power.'' --Toronto Star ''Searing the mind with stunning images while seducing with radiant prose, this brilliant first novel is a story of damaged lives and the indestructibility of the human spirit...The novel will make readers yearn to share it with others, to read sentences and entire passages out loud, to debate its message, to acknowledge its wisdom.'' --Publishers Weekly (starred review) ''[A] beautiful first novel, a work every bit as haunting as her fellow Canadian Michael Ondaatje's celebrated The English Patient...As Michaels, an exquisitely sensual writer, reveals the souls of her extraordinary characters and, like Athos, applies the geologic to the human, she defines love in its most lasting, resonant, and meaningful manifestations.'' --Booklist (starred review) ''Michaels' first novel demonstrates well how one person's life can touch and instruct another's through the power of words. Recommended.'' --Library Journal ''A stunning work, quite beautifully written, and a lovely homage to the imperiled yet