HVWC Reads: Our Narrow Hiding Places, a new book club hosted by Jonathan Vatner (via Zoom)

Join HVWC Year of Your Book Faculty Member, Jonathan Vatner, for the second event of HVWC Reads where our community reads four books of prose a year and meets to discuss them prior to an in person reading at HVWC. This installment, on Wednesday December 4th will feature the novel, Our Narrow Hiding Places (HarperCollins, 2024) by Kristopher Jansma.

NB: The Book Club discussion is free on Zoom for our community. (Donations towards our readings series honoraria are greatly appreciated!) Come to our book club discussion with Jonathan on December 4th & then come to hear Kris read and have him sign your copy of Our Narrow Hiding Places at HVWC on Sunday December 8th at 4pm. (Kristopher is also teaching at HVWC on Dec 8th before his reading. Class is capped at 10.)

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).
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.
Jonathan Vatner is the author of The Bridesmaids Union (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and Carnegie Hill (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). His novels have earned praise from People, Town & Country, The New York Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the managing editor of Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology, and teaches fiction writing at New York University. He lives in Yonkers, NY, with his husband and cats.