Held

‘Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now. We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to. Held explores our conflation of science with technology, the surrender of our ancient relationship with what can’t be seen, and asks why we have so insistently foreclosed on what we have always known – that there is crucial meaning and value in what, necessarily, cannot be proven. Again and again, in different ways, Held asks what forces bring us to a present moment. These forces, from particle physics to evolution, to revolution, to hauntings, to hope, to a gesture, to an error, to empathy, to desire… this is Held’s investigation; and the ways we choose and all the ways beyond our choosing, and all the ways love continues its work long past the span of a life.’

Read the full interview here.

‘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.’

Christian House, Financial Times

‘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.’

Mia Levitin, The Sunday 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.’

Alice Jolly, The Observer

‘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”.’

Andrew Motion, Times Literary Supplement

‘…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.’

Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

‘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.’