The Book of Aron

By National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard, a deeply affecting novel that will join the shortlist of classics about the Holocaust and the children whose lives were caught up in it. For readers of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, Kenneally's Schindler's List; Szpilman's The Pianist; Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces; Markus Zusack's The Book Thief; the works of Pimo Levi and Elie Weisel and Michael Chabon.
When we meet Aron, he is a beguiling and perceptive and not always happy young boy coming into awareness of himself and his family's struggles. When soon they are driven from the countryside into Warsaw, their lives are changed forever. Aron and a group of boys and girls risk their lives scuttling around the ghetto, smuggling and trading things through the "quarantine walls" to keep their people alive, while they are hunted by blackmailers and Jewish and Polish and German police, as gradually things catastrophically worsen, people begin to disappear, and survival is threatened on all sides. Eventually, Aron comes to know Janusz Korczak, a Jewish-Polish doctor famous for his advocacy of children's rights, whose orphanage was relocated to the ghetto once the Nazis swept in. In the end, he and the children he takes care of, Aron among them, are brought to the station to be put on a train to Treblinka. The Book of Aron is a breathtaking novel of extraordinary craft, humanity, and masterful storytelling. Fearless, and devoid of sentimentality, it looks squarely into the face of unspeakable suffering, evil and lawlessness, revealing the persistence and strength of the human spirit despite all odds and the redemptive power of love. It is nothing less than a masterpiece.