Monumental … Fugitive Pieces is the most important book I have read for forty years

This is a novel to lose yourself in; let the language pour over you, depositing its richness like waves lapping sand onto a beach. Michaels is a novelist of unusual and compelling power

Essential reading, both for its exceptional literary craft and for its exemplary and inspiring humanity

All except a handful of contemporary novels are dwarfed by its reach, its compassion, its wisdom … A book to read many times

Extraordinarily magical

Lovely … Musical and magical … Put this book alongside The English Patient

This extraordinarily beautiful novel is a world. A book miraculously created because it mends the hopeless and dances with loss. Trust and read it

An utterly mesmerizing novel told from the core of a poet’s soul focusing upon our very prosaic world. It does what all great novels do: illuminate through the lights of language and intelligence the heart of a hitherto hidden human landscape

Anne Michaels has created a world of stunning, heartbreaking clarity where even the unspeakable is captured in the light-web of her words. She is a superb poet, a breath-stopping storyteller

Searing the mind with stunning images while seducing with radiant prose, this brilliant first novel is a story of damaged lives and the indestructibility of the human spirit. The novel will make readers yearn to share it with others, to read sentences and entire passages out loud, to debate its message, to acknowledge its wisdom