Overview

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.

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"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."

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