Anne Michaels was reluctant to break the spell when, on a flight to England, her neighbour enthused about her 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces, unaware that she was its author. It was a rare moment during the three years promoting her debut novel when the publicity-reticent Canadian writer could enjoy anonymity. Eventually, Michaels confessed, feeling uncomfortable deceiving her fan. But she recoiled from personal questions throughout the promotional circuit.
Fugitive Pieces was perhaps the decade's most celebrated novel about the Holocaust, winning a slew of awards including the Guardian and Orange prizes; but Michaels often refused to say she was Jewish. She feared, she says, that reducing Fugitive Pieces to her own family history would make it less accessible to people from other backgrounds.
With the arrival of her second novel, The Winter Vault, Michaels remains discreet, preferring to see herself purely as an ambassador for the novel. 'It's the book that's touring,' she says. She talks in abstract, sometimes cryptic pronouncements, but can point clearly to the origins of both novels.
With Fugitive Pieces, the opening image occurred to her in 1980: a boy digging a hole in the ground to hide from the Nazis. The idea germinated for nearly two decades, as Michaels supported herself by teaching creative writing and composing musical scores. The spare and lyrically intense novel traces the life of Polish Jew Jakob Beer; rescued by a Greek archaeologist as a child in 1940, he becomes a writer in Toronto struggling with memories of his slaughtered family.
The Winter Vault also grew from a mental image - of structural engineer Avery Escher painting the back of his new wife, botanist Jean, in a houseboat on the Nile. The novel opens in 1964, as the Great Temple at Abu Simbel is being dismantled and reconstructed to salvage it from the flooding waters of the new Aswan dam. The attempt to save a historical monument through replicating it troubles the couple.
'With that single image, of the two on the houseboat by the temple being taken apart, came this notion of destruction and rebuilding,' says Michaels, 52, in her softly insistent voice. 'Perfection is a kind of deceit; the way we commemorate is a kind of remembering, but it is also definitely a kind of forgetting.'