Fugitive Pieces

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This extraordinary first novel by an accomplished poet is powerful and
poetic, a lyric and moving exploration of the depths and heights of
human experience.

Miner’s Pond (1991), the second poetry collection by Torontonian Anne
Michaels, received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was
short-listed for the Governor General’s and the Trillium awards.
Fugitive Pieces is both a novel and a long narrative poem, each sentence
redolent with sensual and reflective images.

Multileveled, the book begins with a young boy, Jakob Beer, who is
orphaned in Poland by the horrors of the Holocaust. Jakob is rescued and
cared for by scientist and humanist Athos Roussos, first on an island in
Greece and, after the war, in Toronto.

In the second part of the book, a young professor named Ben meets the
now–60-year-old Jakob and becomes fascinated by him and his writing.
Ben’s own safe and ordered world is upset by his growing interest in
Jakob.

A preliminary page notes that countless manuscripts of World War II
were hidden and never retrieved: “Other stories are concealed in
memory, neither written nor spoken; others lost, and sometimes
recovered, by circumstances alone.” War never ends, nor do the layered
interconnections of human lives. Fugitive Pieces probes the human
condition and its complexity.