WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE 2024 SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 **The international bestseller** **A Guardian Book of the Year** **Chosen as a book of the year by the independent.co.uk** 'Her prose is a thing of wonder' TELEGRAPH '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

Held is a meditation in novel form about how love shapes us and how we understand death in the light of our relationships. Michaels demonstrates this theme by hopping back and forth in time looking at generations of what seems to the same family as members find partners, bond, and face loss. Much of the action of the novel repeats in these moments as characters face the horrors of war or illness and also meet someone who transforms them utterly and to whom they become inseparably bonded. This is the strength and weakness of Michaels's novel. The writing in places is stunning. Michaels is very good at evocative short phrases generally and when she gets a scene right, it's a transcendent illustration of her theme. The Alan/Mara/Peter section in the second half of the novel is truly moving. It's almost worth the price of the whole book. That said, many of the scenes don't seem to be much more than slightly varied takes on these themes and we weren't sure why they were in the story. For the most part we could follow the family tree as we moved back and forth from World War 1 into the 80s, but in the last third of the novel, characters are introduced that have no clear connection to the family we've been following and new elements start popping up (a party with Marie Curie, an escape from Estonia) that feel random. It wasn't hard for us to see Michaels's themes in these story choices, but there wasn't an diegetic reason to have this content so the narrative just didn't hold together. Held was ultimately frustrating to read. None of us could deny that Michaels nailed certain parts of it both in prose and metaphor, but so much of the novel felt confusing and unnecessary to us. We were very torn on whether we would recommend it or not, and that's maybe the clearest opinion of the book we can give.