**A Guardian Book of the Autumn 2023**'Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity - its depths and shadows' MARGARET ATWOODThe triumphant new novel from the author of the Orange Prize-winning ...

Held is a meditation in novel form about how love shapes us and how we understand death in the light of our relationships. Michaels demonstrates this theme by hopping back and forth in time looking at generations of what seems to the same family as members find partners, bond, and face loss. Much of the action of the novel repeats in these moments as characters face the horrors of war or illness and also meet someone who transforms them utterly and to whom they become inseparably bonded. This is the strength and weakness of Michaels's novel. The writing in places is stunning. Michaels is very good at evocative short phrases generally and when she gets a scene right, it's a transcendent illustration of her theme. The Alan/Mara/Peter section in the second half of the novel is truly moving. It's almost worth the price of the whole book. That said, many of the scenes don't seem to be much more than slightly varied takes on these themes and we weren't sure why they were in the story. For the most part we could follow the family tree as we moved back and forth from World War 1 into the 80s, but in the last third of the novel, characters are introduced that have no clear connection to the family we've been following and new elements start popping up (a party with Marie Curie, an escape from Estonia) that feel random. It wasn't hard for us to see Michaels's themes in these story choices, but there wasn't an diegetic reason to have this content so the narrative just didn't hold together. Held was ultimately frustrating to read. None of us could deny that Michaels nailed certain parts of it both in prose and metaphor, but so much of the novel felt confusing and unnecessary to us. We were very torn on whether we would recommend it or not, and that's maybe the clearest opinion of the book we can give.