The Holding

Loving your sibling is hard.

Simon is nine. He moves through the world as an outgoing creature of the moment, heart on his sleeve, sometimes too loud, sometimes too much. Anna is thirteen — guarded, watchful, sharper than she lets people see, and quietly drowning in the social blood-sport of grade eight. Time is not on their side. The love they do not share can only be made in the young, and they are growing up-and-out of their smallness.

Unseen at the edges of the frame, something outside themselves is trying to bring them together. What they manage — or fail to manage — between themselves will register far past the small horizon of a Canadian childhood.

The Holding is a tender, strange, deeply felt novel about the everyday work of finding, and holding on to each other.