After a few months' hiatus (for which, apologies), we're back to blogging the Guardian's book club – and the next book to be anatomised is Anne Michaels's novel Fugitive Pieces.

First published in the UK in 1997, it won the Orange prize in that year and became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The first novel by a Canadian author previously known for her poetry, it was a commercial success, which was all the more surprising given the obliqueness of its narration and its densely metaphorical prose style. It's made up of two first-person narratives: the first told by Jakob Beer, who has survived the murder of his Jewish family by the Nazis in Poland; the second by Ben, a young academic whom he meets in Canada years later, and whose own parents are survivors of the Holocaust. Both of these narrators are haunted by that catastrophe.

Some critics flinch from any fictional treatment of the Holocaust (though Michaels's narrators do not actually witness its horrors) – and Fugitive Pieces is certainly a novel that has aroused strong feelings among admirers and detractors. In particular, there have been sharp disagreements about its style. Michaels has given both her narrators a preference for metaphor over statement. Both of them express their feelings indirectly, through images and fragments of memory that the reader is left to interpret. Many readers relished the demands of this "poetic" style; some accused it of portentousness. There was equal disagreement about the female characters in the book. Jakob and Ben are both saved from despair by their lovers. Are these female characters idealised? Does it matter if they are?

Audacious or self-important? If you've read it, what do you think? If you first read it a decade ago, is it a book that bears rereading? The chair of the Orange prize committee in 1997, Lisa Jardine, has praised it as a novel that goes to the heart of any disaster. By this account it is not only about the Holocaust: it explores fictionally the aftermath of any traumatic suffering and loss. Do you agree?

Let us know what you think. I'll include some of your responses to the novel in my round-up column in the newspaper and will be discussing the novel with Anne Michaels in a Guardian Book Club event at the Hay literary festival, so please listen out for the podcast ...