GIFTED HANDS BOOK AUTHOR FULL

“We feel the shadow but cannot see what casts the shadow.” “Everywhere the dead are leaving a sign,” she writes. Lost loved ones, fleeting encounters, traumatic events, everyday banalities, they all surround us and we are only separated by a thin membrane of time. Held is infused with ghosts and the sense that everything unknown to us, the past with its dead and the supernatural, is close by, closer than we could ever imagine. Neither is she any less haunted than she was when she wrote Fugitive Pieces.

GIFTED HANDS BOOK AUTHOR FULL

It would be 13 years before her second novel The Winter Vault arrived, based around the dismantling and relocation of the ancient Abu Simbel Temple during the 1960s to make way for the vast reservoir created by the Aswan High Dam.Īnd here we are, a full 14 years after that, greeting the arrival of Held.Īlthough her fiction output barely reaches one book a decade, Michaels’ fascination with the impact of global events on individual lives and relationships remains undimmed. Her debut, Fugitive Pieces, was published in 1996, the story of a Holocaust survivor rediscovering his humanity thanks to the Greek man who rescues him, and won a string of awards including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. The past exists as a present moment.”Ī new novel from the Canadian author is quite an event. “The speed of light cannot reference time. “We can only think of the unknown in terms of the known,” he muses, delirious.

Gifted hands book author