Held

Michaels's Booker-shortlisted novel moves across four generations and more than a century in fragments, jumping between a wounded WWI soldier, his descendants, and a scattering of loosely tethered secondary consciousnesses, held together more by recurring images (photography, physics, ghosts) than by plot. Critics have split sharply on whether that fragmentation deepens the book's meditation on memory and loss or just becomes disorienting scaffolding, with even admirers conceding it's the coldest, least narratively generous entry on the shortlist. What's not in dispute is the sentence-level control: Michaels writes as the poet she is, compressing enormous historical weight into very spare, exact lines. It's a book built for rereading rather than for a single absorbed sitting.