Our Narrow Hiding Places: A Novel

by Kristopher Jansma, Edoardo Ballerini (Read by)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Pushcart Prize-winning author Kristopher Jansma's novel of a war-torn Netherlands introduces readers to a harrowing story of perseverance and the power of family.

An elderly woman recounts her Dutch family’s survival during the final years of Nazi occupation, shedding new light on old secrets that rippled through subsequent generations. 

Eighty-year-old Mieke Geborn’s life is one of quiet routine. Widowed for many years, she enjoys the view from her home on the New Jersey shore, visits with friends, and tai chi at the local retirement community. But when her beloved grandson, Will, and his wife, Teru, show up for a visit, things are soon upended. Their marriage is threatening to unravel, and Will has questions for his grandmother—questions about family secrets that have been lost for decades and are now finally rising to the surface.

But telling Will the truth involves returning to the past, and to Mieke’s childhood in coastal Holland. There, in the last years of World War II, she survived the Hunger Winter, a brutal season when food and heat were cut off and thousands of Dutch citizens starved. Her memories weave together childhood magic and the madness of history, and carry readers from the windy beaches of the Hague to the dark cells of a concentration camp, through the bends of eel-filled rivers, and, finally, to the story of Will’s father, absent since Will’s childhood.

Our Narrow Hiding Places is a sweeping story of survival and of the terrible cost of war—and a reminder that sometimes the traumas we inherit come along with a resilience we never imagined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874627782
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kristopher Jansma is the author of the novels Why We Came to the City and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction has been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, and ZYZZYVA. His nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, The Sun, The Millions, Salon, Real Simple, The Believer, and Electric Literature. Kristopher is an associate professor of English and the director of the creative writing program at SUNY New Paltz.

Edoardo Ballerini is a two-time winner of the Audio Publishers Association's Audie Award for best male narrator (2013, Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter; 2019, Watchers, by Dean Koontz) and the only narrator to be profiled by the New York Times, which called him "A master in his field . . . at the forefront of a new kind of celebrity." He is also a regular voice of "Sunday Reads" for The Daily podcast, reaching audiences of two to four million listeners, and of "Sleep Stories" for Calm, the world's #1 meditation app.

Articles on Edoardo's work have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian (UK), Aftenposten (Norway), Il Giornale (Italy), RTE (Ireland), the CBC (Canada), the Week, and the Week UK. His narrations have been named among the best ever by Oprah Daily, Elle Magazine, Slate, Audible, Business Insider, Newsday, The A/V Club, and People Magazine, among others. He is also a two-time winner of the SOVAS Voice Arts Award, and was named a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine, an honorific granted to only thirty-five actors in the magazine's history.

Edoardo has recorded classics by Tolstoy, Dante, Kafka, Whitman, Poe, Calvino, Emerson, Jack London, Dostoyevsky, and Camus, along with The Hebrew Bible in its entirety, as well as bestsellers by Andre Aciman, James Patterson, David Baldacci, and Isabel Allende, and spiritual titles by The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hahn. His 135-hour recording of Karl Ove Knausgaard's sweeping My Struggle series garnered international attention.

Edoardo Ballerini was a series regular in the critically acclaimed Quarry (Cinemax), and has had recurring roles in The Sopranos (HBO), Boardwalk Empire (HBO), 24 (Fox), Elementary (CBS), and Ripper Street (BBC), among other television credits. He has also appeared in several feature films, most memorably as the star chef in the indie cult classic Dinner Rush, opposite the late Danny Aiello, and most recently in First We Take Brooklyn, opposite Harvey Keitel.

He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

06/03/2024

Jansma (Why We Came to the City) seamlessly interweaves past and present in this immersive dual narrative of a girl in German-occupied Holland during WWII and her American grandson. Mieke Geborn is eight when the Nazis invade her hometown in 1940. After the Jews are deported, and as the German war effort lags, the Nazis enlist local men to work for them. With Mieke’s help, her father conceals himself along with several others in the attic of their apartment building. Conditions worsen for Mieke and the cloistered men during the so-called Hunger Winter of 1944–1945, when harsh restrictions leave the townspeople desperate for food. In a parallel story line set in 2014, Mieke is an 80-year-old widow in New Jersey, where she’s lived for the past 50 years. After a fall in her house, her grandson Will takes leave from his internist job and his troubled marriage to care for her. Jansma rewards readers’ patience as Mieke discloses the extent of the Hunger Winter’s impact on their family and Will comes clean about his marital problems. It’s a satisfying blend of wartime and family drama. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Blending history on an epic scale with folklore and with the most deeply human realism, Our Narrow Hiding Places is a war story—and a love story—as powerful in its particulars as in its sweep. Jansma sets his sights on the largest of historical concerns, which have (as history tends to) become current again: war as a force of inhumanity, the many smaller brutalities that occur in its wake, and the many unrecorded generosities and acts of heroism, too. This novel is a magnificent anthem to the magic of survival in all its forms." — Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson and The Garden

“Our Narrow Hiding Places is a masterpiece, a luminous and gorgeously written story that explores the power and complexity of memory, offering a profound meditation on the resilience of the human spirit and the intimate spaces where family secrets are harbored. This is a novel I’ll be returning to again and again in the years to come, a novel I’ll be recommending to everyone I know.” — Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared

“A vivid, devastating account of Holland's Hunger Winter and a complex, compassionate tale of human resilience. The reverberations of trauma through multiple generations is as much Kristopher Jansma’s subject here as is the endurance of family love. Our Narrow Hiding Places moves seamlessly between the beaches of wartime Holland and the present day beach towns of the Jersey Shore. It gives voice to the sibilant whispering of eels as believably as it depicts a young man's matter-of-fact recollections of a troubled father. A multi-layered novel about memory, community, suffering, and tenacity, told with imagination and grace.” — Alice McDermott, author of Absolution and The Ninth Hour

"Our Narrow Hiding Places is both expansive and intimate, plunging us into Holland's Hunger Winter through the eyes of an unforgettable young girl determined to survive. Jansma masterfully weaves past and present to show us how trauma swims down bloodlines as do the folktales and stories that remind us of where we come from and who we are. A breathtaking epic that reverberates with hope." — Tania James, author of Loot

"Our Narrow Hiding Places is a feat of literary architecture: a masterfully constructed container for some of the most gorgeous and deeply humane writing that I've read in a long time. Kristopher Jansma is a writer at the peak of his powers and this novel is a triumph."  — Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines 

“Never losing hope as its focus, Our Narrow Hiding Places is evidence of the many meanings of survival, and how, even in the midst of chaos, our capacity for courage persists. How we must always fight to preserve the best parts of ourselves, especially in the face of indignity. I can't think of a novel better suited to the current historical moment, in which humanity, empathy, and giving a damn are more needed than ever before. Read this, learn, then act.” — Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck

"A hauntingly beautiful intergenerational novel, Our Narrow Hiding Places infuses the darkest of history with an aching, luminous sense of magic and mystery. An extraordinary achievement." — Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk

“Jansma shows the impact of generational trauma in one family. Book clubs and readers of World War II fiction will enjoy his perceptive take on survival, family, and starting over.” — Library Journal

“Jansma (Why We Came to the City) seamlessly interweaves past and present in this immersive dual narrative of a girl in German-occupied Holland during WWII and her American grandson. . . A satisfying blend of wartime and family drama.” — Publishers Weekly

“Delicate, haunting . . . . Jansma's glimpses into a horrific situation through the eyes of a child make what could have been a familiar story seem luminously strange.” — Booklist

From the Publisher

05/01/2024

Eighty-year-old Mieke Geborn agrees to help a friend translate a book from Dutch (Mieke's native language), having learned that its author was a prisoner at the same concentration camp where Mieke's father-in-law is presumed to have died. Soon, Mieke is recalling her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland, with memories sparked by the book and a visit from her grandson Will. After the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940, Mieke's father's professor friend and his large family came to stay with Mieke's. Then the Nazis came for the professor, and he fled, never to be seen again by his family. Circumstances and restrictions worsened, and Mieke and her family struggled to survive, especially once the Hunger Winter set in in 1944. Chapters from the book Mieke is translating are interspersed between interludes set in the present and Mieke's memories of the Nazi occupation. The chapters from the Dutch book are narrated by eels, whose long lives make them uniquely suited to comment on humanity. VERDICT Jansma (Why We Came to the City) shows the impact of generational trauma in one family. Book clubs and readers of World War II fiction will enjoy his perceptive take on survival, family, and starting over.—Lynnanne Pearson

Library Journal