Held

"Shortlist"

"This year’s winner of Canada’s Giller Prize for Fiction was Anne Michael’s Held , which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Booker judge Sawhney (see above) described it as a very complex, layered book which is “about questioning the nature of existence, and different concepts around consciousness, perception, the nature of reality.” It was, he added, “very interesting because it comes in at so many different ideas from so many different angles.” It’s not a light read, but it is one that will reward your efforts—from the author of the highly acclaimed Fugitive Pieces ."

"It’s a complex book in lots of different ways. It’s heavily layered. It’s interesting that she puts in somewhere an acknowledgement to Simon McBurney, who has a very famous play called Mnemonic , and I do think this book has echoes of that play. It moves around in lots of ways—in time, in location—and ties together lots of different ideas. It starts off in the First World War . I guess it’s about questioning the nature of existence, and different concepts around consciousness, perception, the nature of reality. Issues that are tied to humanity’s efforts to understand the world, I guess. It’s very interesting because it comes in at so many different ideas from so many different angles. It’s probably the hardest book to summarise, because it has so many tentacles, and they connect in ways that aren’t expected. It’s the least linear narrative of all the books we’ve chosen for the shortlist. At the same time, there’s a beautiful, poetic interconnectedness to all the different chapters and timeframes. The events kind of connect each of the stories and individuals together. That’s it, absolutely. It’s a good way of putting it. It is fragmented, and yet I think it is conceptually cohesive. It’s fragmented in that, yes, there are a lot of different stories, but there is a thread that runs through them that you can feel. And it’s beautifully written. It’s like poetry. It also—as I was saying before—looks at how history shapes the present, how the past is constantly being reinterpreted and reimagined. There’s a fluidity in how she moves between different periods that I enjoyed particularly."