Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #779330 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-25
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Trezza Azzopardi's mesmerising debut novel, the Booker-shortlisted The Hiding Place, chronicles the life of a Maltese immigrant family in 1960s Cardiff, Wales, and is a beautifully evocative tale that ignites memories of family, childhood, violence and poverty for one young woman.

Returning to Tiger Bay, Cardiff, for her mother's funeral, Dolores Gauci encounters her sisters for the first time in 30 years after Social Services disbanded them following their father Frankie's abandonment and their mother Mary's attempted suicide. For Dol, aged five when her family is splintered apart, memory is a broken glass pane--a jagged window into the past, permitting only a distorted view and sharp, painful images. Dol remembers the fire, as it licked and then devoured her arm; the rabbit's skin being peeled from flesh,; the self-inflicted scars on her sister's arms; her father's belt cutting into skin.

Sifting through the embers of her childhood, Dol desperately tries to rekindle a flame in her deadened family. Confronting ghosts past and present, she draws a palpable picture of a childhood long-forgotten. Sight, sound, smell and touch caress and burn the reader's senses. Azzopardi questions how Dol, a child at the time, can "remember" and casts into sharp relief the fallibility of the individual's perception of the world--seen from multiple perspectives, there can never be one truth. She revels in disorienting the reader by glimpsing the world from the most unusual, exhilarating angles:

"This is what happens just before I am born: It's 1960. My parents, Frankie and Mary, have five beautiful daughters."

Like an impressionist painter, the author can with just a few simple strokes bring a scene to vibrant life, whether it is the single girls in the bar who leave "the imprints of their bored thighs" remaining "awhile upon the shiny leatherette" or the matchless beauty of the descriptions of Dol's deformity: "a closed white tulip standing in the rain, a church candle with its tears flowing down the bulb of a wrist". Azzopardi's bright flame is sure to burn for a long time to come. --Nicola Perry

Synopsis
A novel of childhood and family feuding, set in the Maltese community of Cardiff's Tiger Bay. Seen through the eyes of Dolores, it tells the story of her compulsive gambling father, Frankie, who loses everything to his rival Joe Medora, head of the Maltese Mafia.

From the Publisher
A heart-breaking story of a family's secrets
Trezza Azzopardi's original and compelling first novel is a tragedy played out in the docks of Cardiff's Tiger Bay. It is the story of the Gauci family, told through the child's eyes of Dolores, the youngest of 5 daughters who watches the family's secrets, slowly revealed. Dolores's view is at once naive and disorientating, leading the reader into the recesses of this unfamiliar world. The Hiding Place is a profoundly touching and beautifully written debut.

`A gripping tale, horrifying and often funny . . . The relationship between the girls, who must fight to survive, is brilliantly evoked' Marie Claire, Book of the Month

`Azzopardi is an assured magician when it comes to tricks to keep the readers turning the pages . . . An astonishingly accomplished book' Independent

`An extraordinarily instinctive writer with a delicate feel for language . . . Azzopardi has written a scalding, thrilling book about the havoc and despair it is possible to wreak inside a family' Maggie O'Farrell, Observer

`Keenly observed, full of small quiet details that capture the harum-scarum lives of Dolores and her family' Elle, must-read

`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.' Mirror

`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' DJ Taylor, Guardian

`The Hiding Place is an accomplished and courageous debut. The setting is original and Azzopardi's approach to her characters is expressionistic. In its sheer strangeness and poetic charge, the novel sometimes recalls other literary one-offs such as Wuthering Heights' Rupert Shortt, TLS

Customer Reviews

A strange but beautiful book
The first ten pages may baffle you, but persevere: it's worth it. This is a beautifully written book of great sadness, the slow-moving, perhaps, but unstoppable story of a woman recalling a traumatic, even dangerous childhood amidst a population of Maltese immigrants in Cardiff.

Wonderful but sad book
Trezza Azzopardi was recommended to me by a colleague, this is the first of her books that I've read and I found it a gripping, beautifully-written read. It's a shocking, terribly sad story but there's a redemptive ending. I don't like the current rash of books of memoirs of children with horrific childhoods, but this is something quite different. Having been disappointed with this summer's offering of 'must-reads' (most of which you really don't have to), this book restored me and reminded me how powerful really good writing can be.

Exellent Read
This is an excellent book, well written, emotional, with a tint of reality. Tezza is a master in character building and narration. However, although many of the characters were supposed to be of Maltese origin, most names and foreign expressions used in the book are, regrettably, not Maltese.