A 1997 novel by Anne Michaels. It explores, in a painful and searching way, the life of the poet and translator Jakob Beer, born in Poland and saved from the Nazi by a Greek scientist that takes him to Greece first, and then to Canada.
In the book we share with the narrator the process of discovering the answer to the eternal survivor's question: why me ? Why did I survive, while all the others (his family, in this case) did not ?
The book has also a very pleasant scientific side, mostly concerned with geology considered as a figure of Time.