Anne Michaels, bestselling award-winning author of Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault, speaks on her mysterious and breathtaking new novel, Held. The novel moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, and modern field hospitals, with unforgettable characters and imagery that delve into the mysteries of human experience and the search for meaning across time.
Sponsored by: Word Vancouver · Banyen Books and Sound
Host: Ross McKeachie
Reader: Anne Michaels, Held (Penguin Random House)
“Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even
grace, Michaels shows us our humanity—its depths and shadows.”
—Margaret Atwood
Held: In 1917, on a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies paralyzed and lost in memories of love, childhood, and chance encounters as snow falls around him. By 1920, he has returned to North Yorkshire, alive but haunted. Reuniting with Helena, he reopens his photography business, only for the past to erupt into the present as ghosts surface in his pictures with messages he can't understand. Spanning four generations, Held explores profound connections and legacies, weaving moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence. The novel moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, and modern field hospitals, with unforgettable characters and imagery that delve into the mysteries of human experience and the search for meaning across time.
Anne Michaels is a world renowned novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation, and Railtracks (co-written with John Berger). In 2020, her novel Fugitive Pieces was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World.
About The Host
Ross Mckeachie
As host of Branches of Wisdom, the Banyen Books podcast, Ross McKeachie has hosted and interviewed hundreds of the world’s leading wisdom teachers, authors and visionaries. He has been apprenticing in traditional Tantra Yoga with his teacher/acharya, Yogacharini Maitreyi since 2015 and is the community director for her not-for-profit school, Arkaya Foundation. In the past, he studied entrepreneurship, trained as an actor and performed stand-up comedy.
