Canadian author Anne Michaels’s first novel, Fugitive Pieces, published in the UK in 1997, was described by John Berger as “the most important book I have read in 40 years”. In 2020, it was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 “novels that shaped our world”. The book explores the long shadow of the Holocaust through the intertwined stories of two survivors.
It was not the story that fascinated readers, though – it was the language. Michaels was a poet before she became a novelist and, in Fugitive Pieces, every sentence has a brilliant crystalline luminosity. Critics were also fascinated by the dreamlike quality of the book and by Michaels’s ability to move seamlessly between the intimate and the epic.
