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.

The Story of the Forest is a multi-generational tale of the Mendel family and its offshoots, over the course of much of the twentieth century. It begins with the young girl Mina, one of five children of a Latvian grain merchant, who wanders into the forest near their home in Riga, ostensibly to pick mushrooms. While she’s there she meets a group of young Bolshevik men and something undefined happens. Whatever it is, it takes on an almost mythological significance as a foundational story in the life of Mina and subsequent generations of Mendels.