Held is a very difficult book to summarize in a short paragraph. In some sort of roundabout fashion, it’s a ‘grand historical sweep’ and a family saga, two things I usually very much enjoy. It begins in the trenches of the First World War, before we follow fairly logically into its aftermath, with the return of a soldier to something approaching ‘normal’ life in an early photography studio. In that same section, it takes a leap towards the supernatural, as the faces of his subjects’ loved ones begin appearing in his images. From here, things begin (deliberately) to fall apart, as the ‘novel’ (in as much as it is one) becomes progressively more fragmentary as it travels though the twentieth century and beyond, encountering along the way several generations of descendants of the original characters and the occasional famous figure like Ernest Rutherford or Marie Curie.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a unique read, flitting back and forth between its protagonist Lia (a mother, wife and creative who has just received a terminal cancer diagnosis) and an unnamed second narrator who may or may not be the cancer itself. It plays with the novel form both in this sense and in its heavy borrowings from the world of poetry, with the text often deviating wildly from novelistic convention and into visual / concrete poetry modes. It’s drawn from personal experience of losing a mother to cancer, and amongst the formal experimentation is a relatively familiar and yet deeply emotive story of coming to terms with (or failing to come to terms with) death and reflecting on life - both the good and the bad.