Held
- Author Anne Michaels
- Narrator Anne Michaels
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 9 November 2023
- Run Time 4 hours and 37 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Fiction: general and literary.
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What to expect
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
**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
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
A warm, gentle and powerful novel; a book of moments, reimaginings, forgettings, disturbances and digressions. Anne Michaels has excelled herself once again.
Michaels' work ... is ferociously engaged in the fundamental universal difficulties of being alive
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
Incredible ... Almost hallucinatory in its lyricism ... A novel of ingenious chronological invention based on four generations of women from the same family
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
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
A graceful, timely, resonant reminder of the trauma of war and the wreckage that it inflicts
Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality
A beautiful work … shifting, merging and separating, wrapping itself around the reader
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
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
Anne Michaels , known for the award-winning Fugitive Pieces, returns with Held,, which spans generations in the aftermath of the First World War
Compelling and well-crafted
Shows how pain and loss permeate generations
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'
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
Her stunning prose sustains the book’s enchanted mood from start to finish ... Each page of this masterpiece has a line worth savouring
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
Michaels brings her poet's finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life’s insistence and beauty
Praise for Anne Michaels: 'Monumental ... The most important book I have read for forty years
All except a handful of contemporary novels are dwarfed by its reach, its compassion, its wisdom
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
Essential reading, both for its exceptional literary craft and for its exemplary and inspiring humanity
Extraordinarily magical
Her writing goes way beyond games or fashion or politics ... It represents the human being entire
Has a quality of crystalline exactness ... A remarkable book
Exquisite ... There are many phrases to be underlined, remembered and savoured
Writing of dangerously beautiful intensity ... magnificent
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
Michaels is a great poet of loss, and the challenges of memory in the face of it ... Michaels produces passages of lyrical beauty
User Reviews
17/01/2025
I can see myself listening to this again.
19/09/2024
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