"For fans of All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale: 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."--
