Held

On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, 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 as the snow falls. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he 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 understandb. b So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and reigniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.