Our Narrow Hiding Places
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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"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
"The searing intimacy of Jansma's wartime chapters. . . document the shifts in Mieke's family life from mildly interrupted routing to desperate struggle for survival." -- New York Times Book Review
