Held

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024

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Held

By: Anne Michaels

Narrated by: Anne Michaels

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Bloomsbury presents Held written and read by Anne Michaels.

**The international bestseller**
**A Guardian Book of the Autumn 2023**
**Chosen as a book of the year by the independent.co.uk**

'Michaels’s writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction' OBSERVER
'Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity' MARGARET ATWOOD
'Michaels is exceptionally open to beauty' GUARDIAN

The triumphant new novel from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces: a soaring and luminous story of chance and change

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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 – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

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

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is a novel like no other, by a writer at the height of her powers: affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom and compassion.

'I am 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' RACHEL JOYCE

Anne MichaelsAnne MichaelsBloomsbury Publishing

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

Anne Michaels' 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)

A warm, gentle and powerful novel; a book of moments, reimaginings, forgettings, disturbances and digressions. Anne Michaels has excelled herself once again.

Michaels' work ... is ferociously engaged in the fundamental universal difficulties of being alive

Michaels is a writer who moves gracefully between award-winning poetry and captivating fiction – and there is a lyrical beauty to this novel … with Anne Michaels, you know you are in the presence of a real and rich sensibility

Incredible ... Almost hallucinatory in its lyricism ... A novel of ingenious chronological invention based on four generations of women from the same family

There is an intense, mysterious beauty that infuses Michaels' precise prose with a compelling power that is exquisite … a profound literary experience that is executed with subtlety, grace and an exquisite intuition

Still a master of her universe… dazzling lyrical snapshots recall the dreamlike style of Fugitive Pieces in the poet’s third novel, a fluid examination of history, memory and generational trauma… The writing is always personal, hypersensitive and profoundly interior… Michaels’s writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction. At the heart of this book lies the question of how goodness and love can be held across the generations

A graceful, timely, resonant reminder of the trauma of war and the wreckage that it inflicts

Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality

A beautiful work … shifting, merging and separating, wrapping itself around the reader

The Canadian novelist’s complex, time-travelling new novel explores trauma, loss and the lasting impact of love … Few authors balance the atrocities of history with the consolations of human relationships quite so effectively as the Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels. She has an uncanny talent for finding curative connections and restorative emotions in hellish circumstances

Just as the characters are held by their love for others, readers are safely held in the utterly tactile and emotional embrace of this incredible novel

Anne Michaels , known for the award-winning Fugitive Pieces, returns with Held,, which spans generations in the aftermath of the First World War

Compelling and well-crafted

Shows how pain and loss permeate generations

Most relevant

This lovely lyric prose and the novel’s vast reach —temporally from 1908 to 2025 and geographically from Brest to Yorkshire—needed a reader able to inhabit the various voices and accents. Instead, the author reads it all in the same breathy, Canadian-accented voice that flattens it all out as if it’s a long nostalgic poem at a single pace. I understand that publishers want this authorial imprimatur but didn’t personally find it effective and even thought it detracted from the novel.