A tale spanning between World War I and our modern day told through short evocative moments displaced through time from the POVs of people related to one another.

Each copy of Anne Michaels’s Held should come with a contract granting the author the right to bounce you around like a human ping pong ball through time and space. Anne Michaels’s Held will provide you with shockingly evocative glimpses into people’s lives, rippling through time, even long after these people have passed away — And you’re going to like it.

Held is about legacy, memory and, more broadly, how our ancestors live on through us.

The secret to its success as a novel is two-fold.

Firstly, Anne Michaels is a great poet and her writing in Held makes that clear. It’s not poetry per-say, it’s prose but if all literary writing exists along a scale between poetry and prose then Held would fall somewhere in the middle.

Secondly, the fragmentary structure of the novel allows Anne Michaels to “zoom in” on specific scenes displaced through time and space leaving room for the reader to imagine how the characters have come to be where they are now, how they got there and where they’re going.

Encouraging the reader to connect all these disparate glimpses into the past into a cohesive whole makes for a particularly rewarding reading experience.

This also feels resonant with Held’s theme of ancestral legacies rippling through time which I think is really cool!