Author(s): Anne Michaels

Novel | Historical | Canada

'Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity - its depths and shadows' MARGARET ATWOOD

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 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.

A warm, gentle and powerful novel; a book of moments, reimaginings, forgettings, disturbances and digressions. Anne Michaels has excelled herself once again. * International Times *
Michaels' work ... is ferociously engaged in the fundamental universal difficulties of being alive * independent.co.uk *
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 * Irish Times *
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 * Observer *
A graceful, timely, resonant reminder of the trauma of war and the wreckage that it inflicts * Daily Mail *
Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality * Sunday Times *
A beautiful work ... shifting, merging and separating, wrapping itself around the reader * New European *
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 * Financial Times *
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 * Quire & Quill *
Anne Michaels , known for the award-winning Fugitive Pieces, returns with Held,, which spans generations in the aftermath of the First World War * GUARDIAN, Best books of Autumn 2023 *
Compelling and well-crafted * independent.co.uk, Books of the month *
Shows how pain and loss permeate generations * Country & Townhouse *
A cleverly fragmentary tale of love, memory and time from the author of Fugitive Pieces shuffles the hopes and dreams of four generations ... Michaels demonstrates that fugitive pieces can make up a structure as strong and as meaningful as a finished monument ... Michaels's intellectual toughness coexists with a tender heart ... Exceptionally open to the beauty of science' -- Lucy Hughes Hallett * Guardian *
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 ... and it's such a transporting read too. It's exquisite - I am in awe -- RACHEL JOYCE
Her stunning prose sustains the book's enchanted mood from start to finish ... Each page of this masterpiece has a line worth savouring * Publishers' Weekly *
A gorgeous meditation on whether the ghost in the machine is actually in our hearts ... A multi-layered and subtle discussion of what keeps animating the web of existence * Kirkus *
Michaels brings her poet's finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life's insistence and beauty * Booklist *
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 Biography: 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.