Held

Reviews

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE • Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • A Heather's Pick • One of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2023 • Named a Best Book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews

“The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.”
—The Booker Prize 2024 judges’ citation

"Held is a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic. . . . Michaels’ mastery of word and situations is understated but insistent, an altogether successful reliance that deflects attention from its author and embeds the reader in the resoundingly mysterious and ephemeral. Here is a novel in which we are willingly held.”
—Giller Prize 2024 jury citation

"A gorgeous meditation on whether the ghost in the machine is actually in our hearts."
—Kirkus Reviews

“Her alchemical abilities are undimmed. It is really a novel-in-stories, delivering a series of pivotal junctures in the lives of a string of characters — some obviously linked, others more tenuously. Spanning the 20th century and reaching into the near future, this series of decisive moments presents love, both romantic and familial, as a temporary balm to inevitable loss.”
—Christian House, Financial Times

“The characters in Held remain hazy. Michaels draws accolades for her incantatory prose — an image-rich style that has led to comparisons to her fellow Toronto resident the poet-novelist Michael Ondaatje.”
—Mia Levitin, Sunday Times

“While the fluid structure of this work may be challenging for some readers, it’s clear that 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. For Michaels, our final task is ‘to endure the truth.’”
—Alice Jolly, The Observer

“The book is divided into twelve fragmented sections that jump – not in chronological order – between 1902 and 2025. It is set mostly in England, but also in northern France, Brest-Litovsk, Paris and the Gulf of Finland, and it contains a large cast of characters who exhibit varyingly degrees of interconnection. On the face of it this amounts to an admirable extension of Michaels’s range; in fact the evidence of difference between the characters and historical moments is so slight that everyone and everywhere tends to seem the same. These people and places are essentially ciphers for the author’s obsessions.”
—Andrew Motion, Times Literary Supplement

“Each battlefield is specific but also representative, a singular event that repeats itself throughout human experience. Ms. Michaels and her radiant novel harnesses this doubleness, finding points of contact between the physical world of mortality and the abstract realm of remembrance… Her imagery shimmers with metaphoric significance.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Michaels’s narrative glides gracefully back and forth in time….Throughout, these stories spark both poignant connections and provocative divergences.”
—New York Times

“Michaels is a Canadian poet, essayist and fiction writer, and her radiant novel harnesses this doubleness, finding points of contact between the physical world of mortality and the abstract realm of remembrance.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Held may be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read . . . Gorgeous . . . Surprisingly expansive . . . Hauntingly beautiful . . . The whole novel is spiked with little detonations of awe . . . Michaels publishes novels so deliberately that each one entrances readers of a new decade.”
—Washington Post
 
“Held is a powerful, prophetic, and poetic work . . . Readers [should] hold tight to Held, a novel for our times—one that starts with war, then moves forward and backwards and forward again with love and with hope.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
 
“‘Gorgeous,’ ‘sublime,’ ‘intensely beautiful’—this novel lives up to every word of praise contained in its glowing reviews . . . A pleasure to read, each elegant chapter is set in a distinct place and moment in time, connecting multiple generations of characters and the ghosts that walk beside them.”
—National Post
 
“Anne Michaels’s 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.” 
—Margaret Atwood, via Twitter
 
"Michaels offers a profound literary experience that is executed with subtlety, grace, and an exquisite intuition for the secret burning pulses of humanity that thrum beyond time . . . There is an intense, mysterious beauty that infuses Michaels’s precise prose with a compelling power that is exquisite . . . Michaels illuminates how the internal life of one person can transcend all external influence. How the interiority of an individual—their capacity for love, empathy, and desire for connection—can be an invisible force of agency that effects change in almost unfathomable ways . . . Michaels has continued to spellbind readers across the globe.”
—Irish Times
 
“Michaels is a writer who moves gracefully between award-winning poetry and captivating fiction—and there is a lyrical beauty to the novel . . . Her descriptions are full of clarity and unsettling insight . . . The gorgeous Held confirms why she believes that ‘hope is never a luxury. It is a necessity, and it is powerful.’ With Anne Michaels, you know you are in the presence of a real and rich sensibility.”
—Independent, Best Books of 2023
 
“Few authors balance the atrocities of history with the consolations of human relationships quite so effectively as Anne Michaels. She has an uncanny talent . . . Her alchemical abilities are undimmed . . . There is a truth to the humanity she depicts.”
—Financial Times

“A cleverly fragmented tale of love, memory, and time shuffles the hopes and dreams of four generations . . . She demonstrates that fugitive pieces can make up a structure as strong and as meaningful as a finished monument.”
—The Guardian

“Michaels's writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction”
—The Observer
 
“Beautifully and sensitively accomplished . . . Readers should feel lucky . . . I found myself reading back over whole paragraphs just for the pleasure of it.”
—The Arts Desk
 
“Michaels’s grave, graceful third novel is a timely, resonant reminder of the trauma of war and the wreckage that it inflicts . . . Michaels has such a delicate touch as she deals with these weighty matters.”
—Daily Mail

“Exquisite . . . There is a profound richness to this novel . . . The narrative momentum never falters. 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.”
—Candace Fertile, Quill & Quire (starred review)

“A gorgeous meditation on whether the ghost in the machine is actually in our hearts . . . Michaels artfully extracts, and reweaves, the often-invisible threads connecting the lives of her characters . . . A multi-faceted and subtle discussion of what keeps animating the web of existence.” 
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Sublime . . . The joys and sorrows of passionate love and grief and the physics of memory are conveyed through the characters’ profound and lyrical musings . . . Michaels brings her poet’s finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life’s insistence and beauty.” 
—Booklist (starred review)

“Luminescent. . . . [Michaels’] stunning prose sustains the book’s enchanted mood from start to finish. . . . Each page of this masterpiece has a line worth savoring.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In Held, history is an invisible thread that links memories, without defining the events…. Each time the pendulum of grief swings to gratitude, your heart will swell.”
—Everything Zoomer

“Amidst the backdrop of personal and global turmoil, Michaels' latest work serves as a reminder of the enduring power of love and the indomitable human spirit.”
—BNN

“[A] masterpiece; her sentences are an index of cosmological discovery…. Magnificent!”
—Vrye Weekblad

“I was 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.” 
—Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson’s Beetle

“Like Michaels’ poetry, this tender but fiercely truncated novel combines its sense of loss, silence, history and identity with a desire to grasp the unquantifiable. The balance of tenderness with technical mastery is enthralling. This profound novel begs for a slow and careful reading to peel back all its layers of raw intelligence and beauty.” —Georgia Phillips, The Conversation
Expand reviews