Description

The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi is a deeply moving and intensely lyrical novel about love and betrayal. Shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize, it portrays the life of a child condemned forever to bear the mark of a disintegrating family.

Dolores is the youngest of six daughters. Growing up in the 1960s in Cardiff’s poverty stricken Tiger Bay, her life is cursed from the start when, on the day of her birth, her father gambles and loses everything on a bet that Dolores will be a boy. As Dolores grows older, we see this strange underworld through her eyes: Tiger Bay is a place of gaming rooms and cafes, of crumbling houses and burning secrets, and for Dolores and her sisters, their home is a dangerous place, filled equally by fear and love.

Thirty years later, the estranged sisters return to Tiger Bay for their mother’s funeral. It is a time of consolation, of memories and nightmares, and a chance for Dolores to understand the tragedy that has shaped her existence.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

Publisher Review

Azzopardi is an assured magician when it comes to tricks to keep the readers turning the pages . . . An astonishingly accomplished book * The Independent * An extraordinarily instinctive writer with a delicate feel for language . . . A scalding, thrilling book — Maggie O’Farrell * The Observer * An accomplished and courageous debut . . . In its sheer strangeness and poetic charge, the novel sometimes recalls other literary one-offs such as Wuthering Heights * Times Literary Supplement * Remarkably perceptive . . . Like the gritty world they inhabit, Azzopardi’s characters command a ragged, sharp-edged dignity in this haunting debut * Kirkus Reviews * The Hiding Place manages to be heart-breaking without being sentimental. Fans of Kate Atkinson and Andrea Ashworth will love this. Read it and weep * The Mirror * A gripping tale, horrifying and often funny . . . The relationship between the girls, who must fight to survive, is brilliantly evoked * Marie Claire * Accomplished . . . [It] proceeds at a cracking pace, full of neat but unobtrusive gestures at the horrors beneath . . . Sharply written, full of crisp little vignettes and cameos * The Guardian *