Awards
2016 PEN New England/L.L. Winship Award
2016 Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature
Synopses & Reviews
Small and sullen, Aron is eight years old when his family moves from a rural Polish village to hectic Warsaw. At first gradually and then ever more quickly, his family’s opportunities for a better life vanish as the occupying German government imposes harsh restrictions. Officially confined to the Jewish quarter, with hunger, vermin, disease and death all around him, Aron makes his way from apprentice to master smuggler until finally, with everyone for whom he cared stripped away from him, his only option is Janusz Korczak, the renowned doctor, children’s rights advocate, and radio host who runs a Jewish orphanage. And Korczak in turn awakens the humanity inside the boy.
Review
"At once heartbreaking, refreshing and—hardest won of all—enchanting. Jim Shepard’s novel enters a crowded canon and it stands there, head and shoulders, with the best." The Jewish Quarterly
Review
"It is the relationship between Aron and Korczak that sits at the heart of the novel [and] it is in the orbit of this entirely good man that Aron’s scarred heart begins to heal and expand." Geraldine Brooks, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Extraordinary....This is a book about annihilation, and the human spirit that somehow lives on, in slivers and cracks." Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
"Transcendent...[The Book of Aron] reminds us of the infinite varieties of good and evil, and of the many paradoxical places in between....Enormous power comes from its stylistic restraint [and] dignity flows from its utter lack of pretension." The San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Immensely rewarding, shocking and beautiful....Shepard, who for years has been one of this country’s greatest fiction writers, is as original here as he has ever been." NPR
Review
"A masterpiece....A story of such startling candor about the complexity of heroism that it challenges each of us to greater courage." The Washington Post
About the Author
The author of six previous novels and four collections of stories, Jim Shepard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife and three children, and teaches at Williams College. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Zoetrope, Playboy, and Vice, among other periodicals.
Jim Shepard on PowellsBooks.Blog
My latest book is yet another collection of short stories — since what better way can we imagine to enact social change in the current United States? — entitled
The World to Come. And once again I’m all over the place in terms of worlds, and voices, from 19th-century English explorers on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions...
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