Author: Anne Michaels
Published: 2023
Pages: 220
Prize: Shortlist, Man Booker 2024
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In 1917, John lies wounded on a battlefield, drifting into memories of a pub, a lover, and his childhood. By 1920, back in North Yorkshire, he struggles with war’s aftermath while reconnecting with artist Helena and reopening his photography business. However, ghosts appearing in his photos disrupt his present, leading to a multi-generational tale of connection, longing, and transformation. “Held” is a deeply affecting novel, rich in mystery and beauty.
Complexity
CEFR: B2
Plot Complexity: moderate
Language Complexity: moderate
Ideas Complexity: moderate
Blurb
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.
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