“Writing Held, I understood instinctively that the disparate pieces of this novel were connected deeply, but did not understand precisely how; connections can’t be forced, one must wait for them to reveal themselves, but this waiting is active, researching and receptive, with all one’s instincts aroused. Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now. We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to. It is especially important to assert this now, when our values, compassion, ideals, aspirations as a species, are being tested, and will continue to be tested to the limit.
This book explores our conflation of science with technology, the surrender of our ancient relationship with what can’t be seen, and asks why we have so insistently foreclosed on what we have always known - that there is crucial meaning and value in what, necessarily, cannot be proven. Again and again, in different ways, Held asks what forces bring us to a present moment. Forces as invisible as the work of a mother who, simply by gazing into the eyes of her infant, knits together the child’s neural network; one could accurately say that love connects our synapses. These forces, from particle physics to evolution, to revolution, to the replication of cells, to hauntings, to hope, to a gesture, to an error, to a silence, to empathy, to desire, to memory... the ways we choose, and all the ways beyond our choosing, how we are connected to each other and through time... this is Held’s investigation; and how, as a species, mortality is perhaps our profoundest insight; and all the ways love continues its work long past the span of a life.” - Anne Michaels
Awards and Honours:
Booker Prize Shortlist
Prix Transfuge du meilleur roman anglo-saxon
“We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”
A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from the author of the international best sellers Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault—a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate
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.
Praise for Held:
“Michaels’s narrative glides gracefully back and forth in time, from North Yorkshire in the 1920s to rural Suffolk in the 1980s, then all the way to 1908 Paris… Throughout, these stories spark both poignant connections and provocative divergences." - Alida Becker, The New York Times (full review)
“Michaels’s fans will recognize the atmosphere of longing that pervades her gorgeous new novel… Perhaps the word ‘romantic’ has been too thoroughly attenuated to use in praise, but ‘Held’ may be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read.” - Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Each battlefield is specific but also representative, a singular event that repeats itself throughout human experience. Ms. Michaels and her radiant novel harnesses this doubleness, finding points of contact between the physical world of mortality and the abstract realm of remembrance… Her imagery shimmers with metaphoric significance.” - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“Michaels’s writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction.”
- Alice Jolly, The Observer
“There is a profound richness to this novel… the narrative momentum never falters… 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. The imagery of cold snow and fog plays against the warmth of the human heart even when the world offers duplicity and destruction. To be held, whether literally or in memory, is to be alive.” - Candace Fertile, Quill and Quire
“With Anne Michaels you know you are in the presence of a real and rich sensibility.”
- The Independent UK
“A gorgeous meditation on whether the ghost in the machine is actually in our hearts."
- Kirkus Reviews (full review)
“There is an intense, mysterious beauty that infuses Michaels’ precise prose with a compelling power that is exquisite…What bonds the seemingly disparate episodes in the novel is the connective tissue of hope. Against the backdrop of epic world events and advances in technology and science, Michaels illuminates how the internal life of one person can transcend all external influence. How the interiority of an individual ‒ their capacity for love, empathy and desire for connection ‒ can be an invisible force of agency that effects change in almost unfathomable ways…Held is…an experience of slow gradual comprehension as the threads continue to knot, unravel and tighten. Michaels offers a profound literary experience that is executed with subtlety, grace and an exquisite intuition for the secret burning pulses of humanity that thrum beyond time. As John asks in the very first line: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe that death lasts forever?” - Helen Cullen, The Irish Times
“Michaels brings her poet’s finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life’s insistence and beauty.” - Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Each page of this masterpiece has a line worth savoring.” - Publishers Weekly (full review)
“[T]he book itself is an accumulation: snapshots of time and place and personal drama, images, impressions, echoes and re-echoes — and yes, even pauses and silences because Michaels, a poet and musician, knows how make them happen on the printed page. The resulting kaleidoscope is proof of this author’s gift for engaging the reader both emotionally and intellectually.” - Jamie Portman, National Post (full review)
“Like Michaels’ poetry, this tender but fiercely truncated novel combines its sense of loss, silence, history and identity with a desire to grasp the unquantifiable. The balance of tenderness with technical mastery is enthralling. This profound novel begs for a slow and careful reading to peel back all its layers of raw intelligence and beauty.” - Georgia Phillips, The Conversation
“Held is a powerful, prophetic and poetic work… a novel for our times — one that starts with war, then moves forward and backwards and forward again with love and with hope.”
- Sharon Chisvin, Winnipeg Free Press
“Anne Michaels’s 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, Twitter
“I was 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, author of Miss Benson’s Beetle