Held

Anne Michaels

Hardcover

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Do you recommend this book?

Yes!

Reader Score

75%

75% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 11 reviews on

Longlist:Booker Prize -Novel (2024)

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from the author of the international best sellers Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault--a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls--a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers.

Book Details

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Publish Date: Jan 30th, 2024
Pages: 240
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.80in - 1.00in - 0.83lb
EAN: 9780593536865
Categories: • World Literature - Canada - 20th Century• Literary• Family Life - General

About the Author

ANNE MICHAELS's books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She has been short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice short-listed for the Giller Prize, and twice long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted into a feature film. From 2015 to 2019, she was Toronto's poet laureate. She lives in Canada.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"A gorgeous meditation on whether the ghost in the machine is actually in our hearts . . . Michaels artfully extracts, and reweaves, the often-invisible threads connecting the lives of her characters . . . A multi-faceted and subtle discussion of what keeps animating the web of existence." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Sublime . . . The joys and sorrows of passionate love and grief and the physics of memory are conveyed through the characters' profound and lyrical musings . . . Michaels brings her poet's finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life's insistence and beauty." --Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred)

"I was blown away by the scale, beauty, weave and thinking of this book . . . It dances with words, time and ideas in a way that seems to reinvent everything I know about the novel . . . and it's such a transporting read too. It's exquisite--I am in awe." --Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson's Beetle

"Luminescent . . . Her stunning prose sustains the book's enchanted mood from start to finish. Each page of this masterpiece has a line worth savoring." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Anne Michaels's compelling novel, Held, couldn't be more timely: war and its damages, passed through generations over a century. Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity--its depths and shadows." --Margaret Atwood, via Twitter