When We Are Held

Ann Michaels is an outstanding Canadian poet and writer, a laureate and finalist of numerous international awards; her books have become global bestsellers, been adapted for film, and translated into 45 languages. Her third novel, "When We Are Held," is... a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize and Prix Femina Etranger, as well as a winner of the Prix Transfuge. It is "a philosophical novel in episodes, covering the period from 1910 to 2025, exploring the boundary between the physical and the inexpressible, the mortal and the spiritual" (The New Yorker). Here, a photographer returning from World War I to his wife, who has been waiting for him, reopens his studio—and ghosts appear in his photographs. And this is just the beginning of a "masterfully compact epic" (Washington Post), in which "from the shards of love and memory... dreams and hopes of four generations are woven together" (The Guardian).