The Book of Aron (Vintage Contemporaries) - Tapa blanda

A Washington Post, Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year

An ALA Notable Book of 2015

Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature

Finalist for the Jewish Book Award
Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

"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

"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

"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

"Stark . . . brilliant, iconic. . . . Ranks with the best literature that explores the dark side of the human soul." --The Toronto Star

"Shepard has distilled his meticulous research into a swift, savage narrative. . . . So rigorous and adroit in its handling of its horrific subject matter, it makes you want to investigate everything else Shepard has written." --The Seattle Times

"Extraordinary. . . .This is a book about annihilation, and the human spirit that somehow lives on, in slivers and cracks." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"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

"A masterpiece [about] the possibilities of love and heroism--and their limits." --The Times (London)
"If Aron owns the rights to the book's seductive narrative voice, it is Korczak who embodies its enveloping humanity. . . . [They] walk into the fire, lifting The Book of Aron into a realm with the finest Holocaust fiction." --The Boston Globe

"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

"Makes us feel anew the bewilderment and horror of that time and place. . . . Flat-out brilliant and deeply empathetic." --Guernica

"A work of art. . . . Shepard turns hell into a testament of love and sacrifice." --Joshua Ferris, The Guardian (London)

"[Shepard has] given the story an urgency and immediacy that made this reviewer read the entire book in only two sittings. . . . A tragedy of heroism, exquisitely written and devastating as it progresses." --Greg Walkin, The Lincoln Journal-Star
"[A] magnificent tour de force. . . . Shepard [is] a writer of extraordinary historical vision, psychological acuity, and searing irony." --Booklist (starred review)

"Understated and devastating. . . . Pitch-perfect." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

The acclaimed National Book Award finalist—“one of the United States’ finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”—now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust.

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.

When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape—as his mentor suspected he could—to spread word about the atrocities? 
Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron’s voice will remember it forever.
From the Hardcover edition.