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Held
- Author
- Anne Michaels
- Narrator
- Anne Michaels
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date
- 9 November 2023
- Run Time
- 4 hours 37 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
- Rating
- 5.0 (2 reviews)
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What to expect
**The international bestseller**
**A Guardian Book of the Autumn 2023**
**Chosen as a book of the year by the independent.co.uk**
'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
_________________________________________________
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
Critics Review
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Anne Michaels' 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, via Twitter
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A warm, gentle and powerful novel; a book of moments, reimaginings, forgettings, disturbances and digressions. Anne Michaels has excelled herself once again.
International Times
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Michaels' work ... is ferociously engaged in the fundamental universal difficulties of being alive
independent.co.uk
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Michaels is a writer who moves gracefully between award-winning poetry and captivating fiction – and there is a lyrical beauty to this novel … with Anne Michaels, you know you are in the presence of a real and rich sensibility
independent.co.uk, Books of the year
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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Incredible ... Almost hallucinatory in its lyricism ... A novel of ingenious chronological invention based on four generations of women from the same family
New European, Books of the Year
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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
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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
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A graceful, timely, resonant reminder of the trauma of war and the wreckage that it inflicts
Daily Mail
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Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality
Sunday Times
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A beautiful work … shifting, merging and separating, wrapping itself around the reader
New European
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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
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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
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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
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Compelling and well-crafted
independent.co.uk, Books of the month
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Shows how pain and loss permeate generations
Country & Townhouse
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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'
Guardian
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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
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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
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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
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Michaels brings her poet's finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life’s insistence and beauty
Booklist
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Praise for Anne Michaels: 'Monumental ... The most important book I have read for forty years
OBSERVER
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All except a handful of contemporary novels are dwarfed by its reach, its compassion, its wisdom
INDEPENDENT
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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
THE TIMES
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Essential reading, both for its exceptional literary craft and for its exemplary and inspiring humanity
SPECTATOR
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Extraordinarily magical
NEW YORK TIMES
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Her writing goes way beyond games or fashion or politics ... It represents the human being entire
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
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Has a quality of crystalline exactness ... A remarkable book
NEW STATESMAN
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Exquisite ... There are many phrases to be underlined, remembered and savoured
FINANCIAL TIMES
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Writing of dangerously beautiful intensity ... magnificent
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
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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
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Michaels is a great poet of loss, and the challenges of memory in the face of it ... Michaels produces passages of lyrical beauty
GUARDIAN
User Reviews
Book 5.0
Narration 4.5
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5.0 5.0
Stunning poetic writing as we would expect from Michaels. It’s like holding on to a thread in a snowstorm, catching lots of stories of different people in times and places, while you notice the settling of some big themes about death, souls and light.
bridgetmck 2025-01-17 -
5.0 4.0
I've listened to this twice, and I increased the rating from a 4 to a 5. It's a beautifully written novel, gorgeous language and has a real bittersweet feel to it: there are a lot of characters here who have loved and lost those they loved, yet their love endures. Held is told in vignettes which don't necessarily link together with characters, but does thematically.
I can see myself listening to this again.ClareR 2024-09-19
Details
- Author
- Anne Michaels
- Narrator
- Anne Michaels
- Duration
- 4 hours 37 minutes
- Release Date
- 9 November 2023
- ISBN
- 9781526659071
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Genre
- Fiction: literary and general non-genre
- Rating
- 5.0(2 reviews)
- Narration
- 4.5(2 reviews)
Synopsis
Bloomsbury presents Held written and read by Anne Michaels.**The international bestseller****A Guardian Book of the Autumn 2023****Chosen as a book of the year by the independent.co.uk**'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_________________________________________________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
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