Anne Michaels latest book Held is a decades-spanning novel about desire, life and death — read an excerpt now
Held will be available on Nov. 14, 2023
Anne Michaels is a writer that moves seamlessly between genres — from award-winning poetry to captivating fiction. The former poet laureate of Toronto's books have been translated into more than 45 languages and her work has been adapted for the screen and the theatre.
Her upcoming book, Held, will be published in fall 2023. Weaving in historical figures and events, the mysterious generations-spanning narrative begins on a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where John lies in the falling snow unable to move or feel his legs.
When he returns home to North Yorkshire with life-changing injuries, he reopens his photography business in an effort to move on with his life. The past proves harder to escape than he once thought and John is haunted by ghosts that begin to surface in his photos with messages he struggles to decipher.
"I wanted to explore the effects over time, of our inner lives — what is essentially invisible; how moments of comprehension, desire, transcendence, doubt, belief, the longing for meaning — work their transformations decades later," Michaels told CBC Books via email.
"As with everything I've written, at the core of Held is a profound hope that has been tested to the limit, the only kind of redemption one might trust and therefore offer to a reader. Hope is never a luxury. It is a necessity, and it is powerful. Especially in these times. Asserting what matters, what we aspire to, how we live, why we live, can — over time, and in a moment — determine a future."
As with everything I've written, at the core of Held is a profound hope that has been tested to the limit, the only kind of redemption one might trust and therefore offer to a reader.- Anne Michaels
Michaels is the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Held will be available on Nov. 14, 2023. Read an excerpt below.
Ernest Rutherford and his young wife were in Paris and we were all invited for dinner at Paul Langevin's that beautiful June night in 1903, to celebrate Marie Curie's doctorate. We had moved outside for coffee in the Langevin's peaceful garden overlooking Parc Montsouris, and it had grown dark and Pierre Curie brought out his lantern — a copper tube bathed in a solution of radium and zinc sulphide — faintly glowing among the leaves like the perfect flesh of a lover one only imagines. Perhaps it was that earthly light or all the talk of Madame Palladino and the levitating table, but I have always remembered the feeling I had, listening to the Curies that night — the shiver, my first realisation that nature, in that new lantern light, could contain something that seemed so alien, something that was impossible to say whether presage or promise.
I have always remembered the feeling I had, listening to the Curies that night — the shiver, my first realisation that nature, in that new lantern light, could contain something that seemed so alien, something that was impossible to say whether presage or promise.
And it was one thing to think about the elements in stone or pitchblende, the radiant heart of inanimate matter, and even a spiritual radiance inside the material human body, but quite another to think of the concomitant: that there might be, in the abstract world, in the domain of the dead, the remnant of desire — the persistence of longing in a phantom body — to feel an apple in the hand, to feel the heat of the sun and the cold of the sea, to taste the salt of the sea on the lips of another, to be opened and held.
Alas, that the dead might remember. I had never considered this possibility before. At the séances of Madame Palladino, the investigating scientists had bound the medium's arms and held her hands, they pressed down on her feet with their own, they insisted the room remain light enough to scrutinise her every movement. Pierre Curie described how they had measured the muscle contractions of her limbs with sensitive instruments while objects flew about the room; they monitored acoustical vibrations, electrical and magnetic fields; they used electroscopes and compasses and galvanometers to analyse objects moving at a distance — yet still Madame Palladino held the very air with her powers, and the table rose, and an invisible force parted the curtains, and no one, not all the intelligence of l'Académie, could detect deception.
In the darkened room of the séance, there had been both the scent of the hunt — the avarice of science, its conflation of knowledge and control – and the satiety of inexhaustible mystery. I listened to them all and could not make up my mind — Pierre Curie was particularly persuasive, pleading that science must never foreclose what it does not understand. And who could speak for the dead, who could prove if they knew or felt, or what they knew or felt? Whether one believed or not in such manifestations — self-motivated objects, telepathic messages, hauntings — the truth was untouchable. The laws of nature would exert their will, regardless. And, I thought, if observation changes the phenomenon, how can we know anything?
And who could speak for the dead, who could prove if they knew or felt, or what they knew or felt? Whether one believed or not in such manifestations — self-motivated objects, telepathic messages, hauntings — the truth was untouchable.
In that hot summer garden, among the branches of the trees, the radioluminescent tube continued to glow with its cold fire. I found myself standing next to Marie Curie. Perhaps it was because I told her that the glow of her radium — not in its colour but in its magic — reminded me of how breath becomes visible, turning white in the cold air, as if we could see what's unspoken, see even silence; perhaps because I was a woman mathematician and I reminded her of her dear British friend Hertha Ayrton, or simply because it was such a welcome novelty to speak woman to woman, she confessed to me, in a whisper, that she was pregnant. As we stood there, smiling at each other, the lit moon came out from behind a cloud, moving slowly across the sky like a planchette.
Excerpted from Held by Anne Michaels. Copyright © 2023 Anne Michaels. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
