October 1, 2023
Badly injured during World War I and nearly lost under a blanket of falling snow, John returns to North Yorkshire, Canada, and tries to get on with his life. But his trauma affects the following generations. From the internationally best-selling Michaels, whose honors include the Orange and Guardian Fiction prizes. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from October 30, 2023
The luminescent latest from Canadian novelist and poet Michaels (Fugitive Pieces) follows a family across generations through love and war. The story opens in 1917 Cambia, France, where John, an English soldier fighting in WWI, lies wounded in the snow and thinks of his artist wife, Helena. Three years later, reunited with Helena but traumatized from battle, John attempts to continue his work as a portrait photographer. He’s both frightened and awed when he discovers that his photographs contain ghostly images of the subjects’ loved ones. The narrative then jumps to 1984, when Helena and John’s granddaughter Mara, a doctor who is four months pregnant, leaves her widowed father Peter and her journalist husband Alan in Suffolk, to join her former medical team in an unnamed war-torn country. Another section takes place in 1903 Paris during a seance with medium Madame Palladino and a group of scientific observers, including the Curies. Michaels links the various threads by exploring the thin divide between the living and the dead and the ways memory can carry her characters between worlds. Her stunning prose sustains the book’s enchanted mood from start to finish (John remembers how as a child, his grandfather’s boots were like “two holes into which his own child-legs could vanish entire”; Helena sees her middle-aged body as “A pear turning soft in the bowl”). Each page of this masterpiece has a line worth savoring. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.
Starred review from November 1, 2023
Love at first sight in chance encounters during wartime occur generation by generation in Michaels' sublime, meditative, and gracefully episodic novel. Her characters are sensitive, questioning, moral, and loving, their lives cruelly disrupted. This scroll of love stories begins on a killing field in France in 1917 where John lies injured, sustained by memories of the snowy night he met Helena. They were blissful together before he enlisted and grateful to be reunited in a small English town. They live above their photography studio, where they face the mysteries of light and dark, the seen and the unseen, and the subtle, fleeting presence of the dead, puzzles passed down with the indelible marks of war as the violence veers from the battlefield to people's homes, destroying neighborhoods and worlds. Their family tree holds doctors practicing under fire, artists fascinated by science (Lia marvels over evolution's "accumulated wisdom."), and a journalist of conscience. With many scenes in winter along rivers, on trains, and in moonlight rooms, the joys and sorrows of passionate love and grief and the physics of memory are conveyed through the characters' profound and lyrical musings. How ardently we long to be held in another's arms and heart. Michaels brings her poet's finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life's insistence and beauty.
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December 1, 2023
A poetic exploration of the liminal spaces and invisible forces in our lives. Canadian poet and novelist Michaels artfully extracts, and reweaves, the often-invisible threads connecting the lives of her characters--some fictional, some historical--from the early 1900s to the near future. The scarifying effects of war are made obvious from the outset through the thoughts and memories of John, a British soldier lying gravely wounded on a World War I battlefield. As the interrelated characters move through the years, traumas, and relationships of their lives, those initial musings are among the topics Michaels explores, including the persistence of desire, the effects of observation on the observed, the finite nature of life versus the (purported) unending nature of death, the presence of the past at all points in life. The physics and metaphysics of life come under Michaels' microscope, but the arts and sciences of photography and radiography are employed as well. (Marie Curie and her acquaintances appear as regular people, not icons of scientific discovery.) Meandering back and forth across generations, Michaels' narrative captures moments of winsome (apparent) coincidence as well as heartbreaking sorrow; more than one young woman loses a husband to death and the threat of war echoes across generations. What is consistent throughout the interwoven lives of the photographers, hat makers, artists, war correspondents, and international crisis workers presented here is the persistent examination of what forces brought them to their destinations. The possibilities include love, chance, particle theory, hope, and desire; Michaels' poetic amalgamation of the lot results in a multi-layered and subtle discussion of what keeps animating the web of existence. A gorgeous meditation on whether the ghost in the machine is actually in our hearts.
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