
Review by Kirstin
Held
What will survive of us
A poetic gem on this year’s pleasingly eclectic Booker Prize Longlist, Held by Anne Michaels explores the many ways that the dead walk alongside us. Spanning time and space, her haunting and humane novel portrays four generations of one family and how their choices, traumas, and loves resonate through decades, if not centuries. From a World War I soldier hovering between life and death on the battlefield, to his granddaughter’s career as a war medic and her own bequeathal, Michaels threads their lives together in a meditation on mortality and inherited history.