Held is a 2023 novel by writer and poet Anne Michaels, published by Knopf, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. An epic novel, spanning from 1902 to 2025, the work tells the story of multiple members of a family spanning four generations. The locations or settings are varied and include a French battlefield during World War I, 1900s Paris, mid-20th century Suffolk, 2025 in Finland, and London. Many of the settings take place in war zones. The narrative is told unconventionally as the plot shifts back and forth from the past to the present or future. The characters in each time period also have few connections to one another, but although the disparate stories have different relationships, characters and plots, several themes recur throughout the narratives. Themes explored by various characters include mortality and death, the philosophy of science, love, the soul, grief, and forms of image capture such as photography.
According to Book Marks, the book received a "positive" consensus, based on eleven critic reviews: seven "rave", two "positive", and two "mixed".[4] In the May/June 2024 issue of Bookmarks, the book received three and a half out of five stars. The magazine's critical summary reads: "For the Readings reviewer, this is a book about "the experience of reading, and the places literature can still take us".[5]
Writing for The Observer, novelist Alice Jolly stated that Michaels explored many human themes such as history, love, loss and trauma using beautifully constructed prose, similarly to her earlier novel Fugitive Pieces.[6] Writing for The Guardian, writer and historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett states the non-chronological manner in which the narrative is told, moving back and forth between different eras, with interspersed memories, dream sequences and meditations of different characters make the work more profound.[7] Reviewing the work for the Times Literary Supplement, Andrew Motion in a negative review, stated that the novel has less "imaginative energy" than her previous novels Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault and that the elliptical plot and lack character development with lack of establishing the settings, essentially makes the characters "ciphers for the author's obsessions."[8]
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