#BlogTour ‘The Hiding Place’ by Jenny Quintana

About the book…

From the bestselling author of The Missing Girl and Our Dark Secret, comes The Hiding Place: a story about identity, love, long-buried secrets and lies.

Abandoned as a baby in the hallway of a shared house in London, Marina has never known her parents, and the circumstances of her birth still remain a mystery.

Now an adult, Marina has returned to the house where it all started, determined to find out who she really is. But the walls of this house hold more than memories, and Marina’s reappearance hasn’t gone unnoticed by the other tenants.
Someone is watching Marina. Someone who knows the truth . . .

Published  by Pan Macmillan on 18th March, I am so thrilled to bring you my review of ‘The Hiding Place’, as part of the Random Things Blog Tour.

HUGEST apologies to all involved for getting the wrong date in my diary, and posting today instead of my proper date, the 20th March, such a silly thing to do(also now a bit worried about what I was supposed to be doing today instead…it’ll come to me!)

Anyway, more importantly, the book.

What a story, it is heartfelt, and told in two timestreams-the 1960’s and the 1990’s , where the consequences of what one generation did, filter into the lives of those occupying the same building 3 decades later.

Marina-named by the nurse who cared for her in hospital after she was found, abandoned in the hallway of the house in Harrington Gardens-has moved into what looks like DIY programmes describe as a ‘fixer-upper’, a flat with a dodgy boiler, intermittently scalding water, and mould on the windows.

Despite having had a loving adoptive family, something in Marina has always looked for the answer as to why she was found, in a cubby, or hiding place, by the open front door of the building which has been divided into 5 flats. She works as a translator of a Polish writer’s memoirs, and as she translates the lives of others, she has come to realise that she needs to be the narrator of her own story.

As Marina navigates her investigations into flat occupants, present and past, her chapters are interlaced with the voice of Connie, a young woman living with her bookshop owner father, in the 60’s. Finding herself with a certain ‘predicament’, abandoned by her boyfriend and pretty much harassed by the basement flat dwelling colleague of her dad, she suffers from the same disillusionment and dreamy nature that she finds so frustrating in her father. Lost in poetry and books, she believed all of the words whispered to her in the snatched moments that they steal in the attic. After the death of Connie’s mother, both she and her father have become un-anchored and find themselves adrift in imaginary worlds until they are forced to reckon with the reality of racing calendar months and bills to pay.

As the two stories move towards an intersection point, you are not entirely sure whose baby Marina is-you suppose it could be her that Connie is carrying, but through the clever dropping of clues throughout the narrative of the other flats, it is not entirely certain whose baby Marina is until near the end of the book. And it becomes clear to the reader that this is about Marina finding her place in the world by taking a step back, and examining her past in order to move forward with a brighter future. Connie’s story is heartbreaking as you realise it really was not that long ago that women had very little option when it came to having babies out of wedlock. She has no mother to guide or advise her, her father is loving but immensely impractical , so her burden is hers alone to carry.

Marina has the option to be her own person, time has moved on since Connie lived there, and the notion of stories lying in wait until people like Marina bring them into the light, is weighted with so many feelings of regret, time lost and bones left unburied.

The characters in the house, in the 60’s and the 90’s, all play a part in the story where Harrington Gardens becomes emblematic of the passage of time, the lives that are touched in this house and how it gives up it’s secrets. You can never really clear away every trace of your belonging somewhere, and, although, this is kind of a mystery in what happened to Marina’s mother that meant she abandoned her, there social and cultural norms at the time were such that men had their fun whilst the women were left to deal with the consequences. And. as several of the women attest, there was not always a happy ending for everyone.

The idea that I was left with after the book was finished, was that the stories of the places we inhabit are there, just waiting for a patient observer to find the clues, take apart and translate the past into a story which makes sense in the present.

A fantastic character study, this was such a great read, one that was deeply moving and incredibly satisfying.

About the author…

Jenny Quintana grew up in Essex and Berkshire, before studying English Literature in London.

She has taught in London, Seville and Athens and has also written books for teaching English as a foreign language.

She is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative writing course. She now lives with her family in Berkshire. ‘The Missing Girl’ is her first novel, followed by ‘Our Dark Secret’, both published by Pan Macmillan/Mantle.

Twitter @jennyquntana95 @panmac @RandomTTours