Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity
Margaret Atwood

Sam from Max Minerva's thoughts:

Novels are often called poetic but few I've read cross the boundary into poetry as easily as Held does. Sometimes written in stanzas, sometimes in individual lines, and sometimes in more conventional chapters, the form flows beautifully to convey the moments being described. And Held is more a collection of consequential moments than a linear story of one family's lives across a century. Michaels' writing is so beautiful, so hauntingly meditative though, that I was more than willingly to be swept along, occasionally disorientated, by her contemplations on what it means to love and what it means to lose those that you do love.

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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, 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

'Michaels’s writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction' OBSERVER

'Michaels is exceptionally open to beauty'
GUARDIAN