Held

(Paperback)

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The triumphant new novel from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces: a soaring and luminous story of chance and change 1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, 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.

Reviews

Praise for Anne Michaels: 'Monumental ... The most important book I have read for forty years -- JOHN BERGER * OBSERVER *
All except a handful of contemporary novels are dwarfed by its reach, its compassion, its wisdom -- GEOFF DYER * INDEPENDENT *
This is a novel to lose yourself in; let the language pour over you, depositing its richness like waves lapping sand onto a beach. Michaels is a novelist of unusual and compelling power -- ERICA WAGNER * THE TIMES *
Essential reading, both for its exceptional literary craft and for its exemplary and inspiring humanity * SPECTATOR *
Extraordinarily magical * NEW YORK TIMES *
Her writing goes way beyond games or fashion or politics ... It represents the human being entire -- MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Has a quality of crystalline exactness ... A remarkable book * NEW STATESMAN *
Exquisite ... There are many phrases to be underlined, remembered and savoured * FINANCIAL TIMES *
Writing of dangerously beautiful intensity ... magnificent * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH *
Read this book like poetry, or rather hear it like music ... Anne Michaels guides us to the top of some extraordinary peaks of feeling and perception * INDEPENDENT *
Michaels is a great poet of loss, and the challenges of memory in the face of it ... Michaels produces passages of lyrical beauty * GUARDIAN *

Author Bio

Anne Michaels books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor-General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice longlisted for the IMPAC Award. Her novel, Fugitive Pieces, was adapted as a feature film. From 2015 to 2019, she was Torontos Poet Laureate. She lives in Canada. annemichaels.ca