Held

Title:

Held

Author:

Michaels, Anne, 1958- author.

Summary:

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. -- Amazon.

Edition:

First United States Edition.

Physical Description:

219 pages ; 22 cm

Subject Term:

World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction.

Veterans -- Fiction.

Desire -- Fiction.

Families -- Fiction.

Man-woman relationships -- Fiction.

Publisher:

Alfred A. Knopf,

Publication Date:

2024

2023

ISBN:

9780593536865

9780593470848

Publication Information:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Call Number:

MICHAELS

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003694208	New Adult Fiction	MICHAELS Anne	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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 Notes

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.

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)