Last week I read A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson and one of my comments was that it 'wasn't a stand-out read for me', and difficult to see how it had made the Booker Longlist. This week I feel more justified in saying that because Held by Anne Michaels has such a high quality of writing and thought-provoking content that from the first page I felt as though I was reading something special. When I am reading, I particularly like it when an author gives me something to read that causes me to stop for a moment and consider what is being said. The opening line of this book is: 'We know life is finite. Why should we believe that death lasts forever?' The whole book is divided up into small segments as though we are turning the pages of a photograph album that gradually reveals who the people are from crumbs of information left for us to follow. The segments are within sections that move across generations and the thread that binds them is the idea that we...