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Held  By  cover art

Held

By: Anne Michaels
Narrated by: Anne Michaels
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Publisher's 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.

©2024 Anne Michaels (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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

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.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“This episodic, philosophical novel orbits a group of loosely connected characters living between 1917 and 2025 . . . Throughout, characters ponder the boundaries between the physical and the ineffable, the mortal and the spiritual.”The New Yorker

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Damage to people done by warping check, ,

Disliked jumping from unrelated time sequences. Breathy reader is good for some chapters but not for all

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P.8

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Poetry of the Heart

Held is read by the author, Anne Michael. It is a book of vignettes of love, loss, desire, death, the unseen world as well as meditations on war and other memories. The prose is beautiful and poetic. I listened to this book twice in order to take it in. I love Anne Michael’s writing. Fugitive Pieces is by far my favorite. I read that book many times. I rarely reread books even though I read constantly. I loved this book but I needed the second read in order to have it sink into my soul. The beauty of this book brought me peace and stillness. I may listen to it again sometime. This book definitely will not be for everyone. I think it is for meditative spirits and people who value poetry of the heart.

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