Fiction
Novel
HELD
Description
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. As the snow falls, he is lost to memory a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast. When John returns from war to North Yorkshire, he is reunited with an old friend, reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand, as the century unfolds before him.