Fugitive Pieces

Title: Fugitive Pieces

Author: Anne Michaels

Number of pages: 304

Started: 16 February 2008

Finished: 23 February 2008

Opening words:

Time is a blind guide.

Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city. For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin's wooden sidewalks. Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River. Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.

Plot summary:

The stories of two men from different generations whose lives have been transformed by war. A young boy, Jakob Beer, is rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city during World War II and taken to an island in Greece by an unlikely saviour, the scientist/humanist Athos Roussos.

What I thought:

I enjoyed this book. It was very well written and I think you could tell that it was written by someone who was previously better known as a poet. This book had some great sadness in it, but was also a book about rescue as well. It was a book that also made me think about God and why some people believe and others might prefer to believe that no God exists – because the evil that some people do is best not seen as part of some “bigger picture”. Interesting, challenging book.