Born in Toronto in 1958, Anne Michaels is widely regarded as one of Canada’s most versatile writers. Winning early fame as a poet, Michaels soon branched into prose, bringing the crystalline clarity and sensuous pulse of her poetry to her novels, which, though relatively short in length, are dense with lyrical turns of phrase, evocative imagery, and spiritual and philosophical musings. A believer in the power of spare, highly concentrated prose, Michaels shares that she has always “been rapt by books that say as little as possible in order to express everything that matters: concise, subversive, intimate, a voice whispering in our ear” (“Ann Michaels Interview: ‘Every Poem Is a Poem of Witness.’” The Booker Prizes, 2024).

Held, the shortest of her three novels, is nonetheless her most sprawling work, taking the form of an intergenerational saga that unfurls over 122 years and several continents. Michaels’s spare, fragmented narrative, which at times resembles a prose poem, allows her to focus on resonant images, ideas, symbols, and character traits that recur throughout her many characters’ lives, weaving through the generations like threads of DNA in a family history.