A Joy to be Hidden

By Ariela Freedman

Alice Stein, a young graduate student living in a vivid and chaotic late-90s East Village, loses her father and grandmother in a single year. In the process of cleaning out her grandmother's Brooklyn apartment, she begins to unlock a family secret. Accompanied by her precocious downstairs neighbour, a twelve-year-old girl named Persephone, she sets out on a quest to understand her family and herself. In the process, she will discover lost children and buried love affairs, histories she wants to believe and people she can't trust, a village in Hungary and an artist's loft in Harlem.
A coming-of-age story about hidden pasts and the legacy of trauma and displacement, A Joy To Be Hidden is told with humour and insight. We can never quite forget the title quote by D. W. Winnicott: "It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found." We soon discover that it applies to everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781773900117

Ariela Freedman

Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2014 Mentorship Program. Arabic for Beginners, published by LLP in 2017, is her first novel, followed by A Joy To Be Hidden (LLP, 2019) and L/a (LLP, 2022). She has a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches literature at Concordia’s Liberal Arts College in Montreal, where she lives with her husband and two sons.

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