I am voracious reader, but an incurably critical one as well - which makes my giving the thumbs up to all of 5 books, virtually impossible. I have certainly enjoyed innumerable books, but few leave me fully satiated, or to put it more accurately, there are few that I find “well rounded” enough to have my approval/recommendation attached to!

Starting on that highly pessimistic footing, I highly recommend Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. It is a book about the legacy of the holocaust, but what it is about is irrelevant – the beauty of the book lies in the brilliance of the writing. There is depth in the emotions and sentiments that are explored in the book – however, I doubt if there are any human emotions that have not been depicted ad nauseam in various forms of art – so the joy of reading Fugitive Pieces is not in the fact that it explores those emotions and sentiments, but in the artistry with which they are captured. That is the quintessential difference between good art and bad – unfortunately not the substance of it, but rather the rendering of it. Or so I believe.

And the most beautiful part about the sort of rendering Anne Michaels has done is the fine line it walks between prose and verse. She has given us a wonderfully poetic novel.