Fiction / World Literature / Canada / 20th Century > Held
Canadian Read
Held: A Novel
By Anne Michaels
Where to buy
Publish Date
September 03, 2024
Category
Fiction / Literary
Fiction / Family Life
Price
$22.00
A breathtaking and mysterious novel from the beloved Anne Michaels, internationally bestselling author of Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault.
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut[RR1] , 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 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 consequenceigniting and re-ignitingas the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. This resonance through time—not only of actions but also of feelings and perceptions—desire in its many forms—are at the heart of this novel’s profound investigation.
Held is a deeply affecting and intensely beautiful novel, full of unforgettable characters and imagery, wisdom and compassion. It explores the deepest mysteries, and the ways in which desire in its many forms—and perhaps the deepest desire, to find meaning—manifests itself. Held moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, modern field hospitals…while lovers find each other and snow drifts down across the centuries. From its opening lines, Held is alive with seeking: "We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”
ANNE MICHAELS is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation, and Railtracks (co-written with John Berger). In 2020, her novel Fugitive Pieces was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World.
ISBN: 9780771005473 Format: Paperback Pages: 240 Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Published: September 03, 2024
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE • Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • A Heather's Pick • One of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2023 • Named a Best Book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews
“The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.”
—The Booker Prize 2024 judges’ citation
"Held is a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic. . . . Michaels’ mastery of word and situations is understated but insistent, an altogether successful reliance that deflects attention from its author and embeds the reader in the resoundingly mysterious and ephemeral. Here is a novel in which we are willingly held.”