Bloomsbury are delighted to be offering five reading group ten paperback copies of the soaring, luminous new novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces, HELD.
‘Her prose is a thing of wonder’ TELEGRAPH
‘Michaels’s writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction’ OBSERVER
‘Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity’ MARGARET ATWOOD
‘Michaels is exceptionally open to beauty’ GUARDIAN
The triumphant new novel from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces: a soaring and luminous story of chance and change
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.
To be in with a chance of winning copies for your reading group, please email [email protected] with the subject line ‘RE: HELD’ by 8th December.
