18/09/2025
Happy publication day to Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades 🧡💕
‘She drinks coffee until she can drink wine and then she goes to sleep so that she can wake up and drink coffee until she can drink wine again. Is this not the story of every mother, she asks herself.’
Hiding Places is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby.
Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a ‘book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays’, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis. The result is a fresh, funny and deeply moving look at what it means to care and to create – at what gets lost or hidden in the process, and what is found or revealed. ‘It’s not what she says,’ writes Edmeades, ‘but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath.’
Out now!
Find in your local bookstore 🧡
Find out more at oup.nz/hiding-places
And join us tonight for the launch at University Book Shop Otago! All are welcome!
