Fugitive Pieces

it seems to be something of a goodreads sin to give this book any fewer than four stars. and were i rating it solely on the beauty of its language, it would be an easy five-star book. but as a novel, it missed the mark for me somewhat, so it is really just a high-three for me. i know - blasphemer! th......more

Click here to watch a video review of this book on my channel, From Beginning to Bookend. A haunting elegy. Michaels pairs the story of an orphaned Jewish boy who clings to memories of the family he lost during a Nazi raid in 1940 with the narrative of a man whose parents survived the concentrati......more

"To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?" Jakob Beer is a Holocaust survivor. At the age of seven, he is rescued while on the run – a fugitive of sorts – from the death grip of the Nazis. His mother, father and beloved sister Bella are not so for......more

This novel often reminded me of what a brilliant accomplishment Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is. There are parallels. The piecing together of shards, of fugitive pieces, the deployment of one narrative to unravel another, in an attempt to complete biography. It’s not, of course, as good as The Waves –......more

A novel that wants to convince us academics can be deeply feeling, sensitive to personal life and even sexy! A seven year old Jacob Beer is hiding behind a wall when his parents and sister are taken away by the Nazis. He is eventually rescued by a Greek archaeologist and smuggled to Greece where he s......more