Held
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
**The international bestseller**
**A Guardian Book of the Autumn 2023**
**Chosen as a book of the year by the independent.co.uk**
'Her prose is a thing of wonder' TELEGRAPH
'Michaels's writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction' OBSERVER
'Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity' MARGARET ATWOOD
'Michaels is exceptionally open to beauty' GUARDIAN
The triumphant new novel from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces: a soaring and luminous story of chance and change
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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.
'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' RACHEL JOYCE
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
