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.
Tracy O’Neill is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was named a Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellow. O’Neill teaches at Vassar College, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University.
Our Narrow Hiding Places follows eighty-year-old Mieke Geborn’s life 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. 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. This novel is based on the author’s grandmother and her childhood memories of the end of WWII and her survival during what’s known there as The Hunger Winter, when nearly 20,000 Dutch citizens starved to death during the final months of Nazi occupation. Writing this book took him deep into history, all the way to Amsterdam and The Hague.
And Our Narrow Hiding Places is getting great early reviews already: Publishers Weekly says that it “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” and Booklist calls it “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.”
Author Dan Chaon calls it, “A hauntingly beautiful intergenerational novel… infuses the darkest of history with an aching, luminous sense of magic and mystery. An extraordinary achievement” and Alice McDermott says it is “a complex, compassionate tale of human resilience. […] A multi-layered novel about memory, community, suffering, and tenacity, told with imagination and grace.” You can preorder today or get it on 8/13 wherever books are sold (
Bookshop/
Amazon/
B&N).
MOST ANTICIPATED READ and MUST READ OF 2024: The Millions, LitHub, Esquire, BookRiot, Bustle, Vulture, Boston Globe, Brit & Co, Southern Living A National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honoree delivers her first work of nonfiction: a compulsively readable, genre-bending story of finding her missing birth mother and, along the way, learning the priceless power of self-knowledge.
In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea. After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done, picking up the trail of clues and becoming her own hell-bent detective. Despite COVID-19, the promise of what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own—was too tempting. Written like a mystery novel, Woman of Interest is a tale of self-discovery and fugitivity from convention that features a femme fatale of unique proportions, a former CIA operative with a criminal record, and a dogged investigator of radical connections outside the nuclear family. O’Neill gorgeously bends the detective genre to her own will as a writer, stepping out of the shadows of her own self-conception to illuminate the hopes of the woman of interest she is both chasing and becoming.
