Held -- Anne Michaels, Hardcover

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.

Author: Anne Michaels
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 01/30/2024
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.80w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780593536865

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 10/01/2023 pg. 17
Publishers Weekly 10/30/2023
Booklist 11/01/2023 pg. 33
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2023

About the Author
ANNE MICHAELS's books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She has been short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice short-listed for the Giller Prize, and twice long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted into a feature film. From 2015 to 2019, she was Toronto's poet laureate. She lives in Canada.