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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
January 30, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593825273
- File size: 129380 KB
- Duration: 04:29:32
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from October 30, 2023
The luminescent latest from Canadian novelist and poet Michaels (Fugitive Pieces) follows a family across generations through love and war. The story opens in 1917 Cambia, France, where John, an English soldier fighting in WWI, lies wounded in the snow and thinks of his artist wife, Helena. Three years later, reunited with Helena but traumatized from battle, John attempts to continue his work as a portrait photographer. He’s both frightened and awed when he discovers that his photographs contain ghostly images of the subjects’ loved ones. The narrative then jumps to 1984, when Helena and John’s granddaughter Mara, a doctor who is four months pregnant, leaves her widowed father Peter and her journalist husband Alan in Suffolk, to join her former medical team in an unnamed war-torn country. Another section takes place in 1903 Paris during a seance with medium Madame Palladino and a group of scientific observers, including the Curies. Michaels links the various threads by exploring the thin divide between the living and the dead and the ways memory can carry her characters between worlds. Her stunning prose sustains the book’s enchanted mood from start to finish (John remembers how as a child, his grandfather’s boots were like “two holes into which his own child-legs could vanish entire”; Helena sees her middle-aged body as “A pear turning soft in the bowl”). Each page of this masterpiece has a line worth savoring. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. -
AudioFile Magazine
Celebrated Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels has written an exquisite novel (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) that looks at love, loss, and human connection. Michaels's intimate delivery and empathetic tone serve her bittersweet and elegiac text well. Starting in 1917 with a battlefield explosion, her exploration of characters during troubled times spans a century and ends in the near future. This is a nonlinear philosophical story told in the elegant voice of a poet. The first sentence sets the stage, "We know life is finite; why should we believe death lasts forever?" This extraordinary novel plumbs the heart through vignettes of a photographer, a doctor, and a journalist in troubled places. It is a mesmerizing listen. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
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