Fugitive Pieces

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [viii], 294, [2]. Black cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; sewn-in silk ribbon marker. Jacket design by William Webb with cover photograph by Jeff Cottenden (priced £15.99 to front flap). First issue with burgundy endpapers; subsequent printings issued with white endleaves. Predated by the Canadian edition (issued as a paperback original), but itself precedes the American publication.

Signed by Author on title page.

A 1997 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Listed on the BBC's rankings of the 100 Novels That Shaped Our World (2019). Author's third book and first novel. The story of an orphaned Polish Jew who having been rescued from the Holocaust by a Greek geologist, must himself excavate meaning from the horrors of his own memory bank in order to heal.

Ten years in the writing, Michaels's research took her to Athens to study in the Jewish Museum of Greece and she further explored "the war" through both "original testimony as well as the work of historians." She also studied political theory, geography, geology, cartography, the journals of arctic explorers, Yiddish song books, and translations of The Psalms (Fugitive Pieces "Acknowledgements" 295).

In her essay "Unseen Formations," published in the literary journal Open Letter 8.4 (Summer 1992), Michaels states that for her, memory is inescapably linked to landscape and her poetry and fiction "like a landscape" or "an archaeological/geological slice" attempt to "reflect layers of time as well as meaning. Every landscape is a narrative: the static surface is an illusion, and actually reveals all the earth forces that forged and continue to forge the present geological moment". In that way, she explores events "through geology, natural history as well as biography, history".

In 1997, within a year of the book's publication, Michaels won several of literature's most prestigious awards – including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award in the United Kingdom, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in the United States, the City of Toronto Book Award, Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, Heritage Toronto Award of Merit, and Ontario's Trillium Book Award in Canada. In 2008 it added Britain's Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction into the tally (with yet more to follow), earning its author an estimated $200,000 in prize monies – an amazing sum for a part-time writing instructor at the University of Toronto.

A film adaptation directed by Jeremy Podeswa, starring Stephen Dillane and Rade Šerbedžija, premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. "The most important book I have read for 40 years." –John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing