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Synopsis

The Hiding Room by Jonathan Wilson

The Hiding Room moves between Cairo and British Mandate Palestine in 1941, and Israel of 1991. In 1941 a reserved English officer falls for a waiflike Viennese Jew trying to flee to Palestine. He betrays her, then tries to save her from the consequences of his action. He too has to flee, at risk both from his fellow British soldiers and the Zionist underground. Fifty years on, at the height of the Intifada, the son of this brief partnership comes to Israel and Palestine to trace what happened to his father.

'Moving and triumphant
— Sunday Telegraph

'Riveting... a story so compelling, you resist leaving it.'
— Elle

'An intense and frequently dramatic novel... this story of love, betrayal and redemption is a significant achievement.’
— Publishers Weekly (USA)

‘Like Pat Barker’s Booker Winner, 'The Ghost Road', 'The Hiding Room' does not look back nostalgically. It is an astringent, often brutal, illustration of how events shape individual lives and even bring them into being.’
— Carole Mansur, the Daily Telegraph

‘The Hiding Room’s' impressive strength is that Wilson does not imitate Greene, in his own distinctive terms… he continues him.’
— LA Times

‘The rewards of reading… Jonathan Wilson’s superb novel… are almost as equalled by the pleasure of recalling It.’
— Boston Sunday Globe

Published in the USA by Penguin, this is the first UK paperback publication.

Jonathan Wilson is the author of the biography Marc Chagall; two novels, A Palestine Affair and The Hiding Room; two collections of stories, Schoom and An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble; and two critical studies of the fiction of Saul Bellow. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications.

Reviews of The Hiding Room

	14 March 2008
Jonathan Wilson's men in mid-lef crises
Reviewer: David Herman Publication: Jewish Chronicle
...(The Hiding Room is) set in wartime Palestine which first came out in 1995 and has now been republished. It is half-love story, half-historical thriller. Another of Wilson’s men in mid-life crisis has come to Israel to bury his mother. He becomes increasingly preoccupied with his unknown father. Who was he? And why did his mother speak so little about him? This is intercut with the story of an English officer, Archie Rawlins, and a young Jewish refugee whom he meets —- and falls for — in wartime Cairo. It doesn’t work too well as a thriller and is much more interesting as an exploration of identity. None of the main characters really belong; they are all different kinds of outsider. They are all foreigners: Jewish refugees or British officers in the Middle East. More interestingly, they are not at ease with themselves. Mendoza, a rabbi with the British army, a fascinating creation, doesn’t fit in with his antisemitic colleagues. Rawlins isn’t from the right class and his conventional, English upbringing is too constricting, too inauthentic. His romance with Esta, the Jewish refugee from Vienna, brings him in touch with new, more passionate, even violent feelings. His world starts to crumble around him. Can he find a new kind of self and what should it be?... David Herman
	28 August 2007
Reviewer: Peter Sherwood
In this vividly and confidently written book, Jonathan Wilson's spare and precise prose continues in the vein of his first collection Schoom (1993), in which he showed an enviable ability to write about British Jewishness. Here, he takes on not only the "Jewish survivor" but, particularly, British attitudes to the Arabs and Jews in the Middle East during the Second World War. There is also a parallel and, in the end, skilfully dovetailed story set in the Israel of fifty years later. Peter Sherwood

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