Hiding Place - Softcover

Azzopardi, Trezza

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552631613 ISBN 13: 9781552631614

Publisher: Key Porter Books, 2000

Synopsis

Tiger Bay, 1948. Frank Gauci steps off the Callisto into the coldest winter ever, clutching a cardboard suitcase. Its all he has - until he finds a ruby ring, Joe Medora and beautiful Mary. Maybe, Frankies luck is about to change. Ten years later, with a mass of debts, five daughters and another child on the way, Frankie lays one more bet on the cards. This time it has to be a boy. But it was not to be a boy. And now everyone has to hide - Frankie from Joe and the syndicate, Mary from the rent man, the daughters from their father. Even the newborn Delores is hidden in a seamans chest. Out of Frankies sight, but not out of danger. In compelling detail Trezza Azzopardi describes a world rarely seen in fiction. Through the eyes of Delores Gauci, she reveals the Welsh underworld of the sixties - the cafes and bars, the crumbling housing, the gambling rooms - and the secrets that destroy a family. Trezza Azzopardi is a rare new talent in contemporary fiction. The Hiding Place is an astonishing debut. (2000)

About this title

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

Review

A brilliant debut novel shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize set in the Maltese community of Tiger Bay in Cardiff. Dolores, the narrator, tells the story of her childhood and her compulsive gambler father who loses everything to the head of the Maltese Mafia. His gambling leads to a fire that disfigures her and the story flits between past and present as Dolores reflects on her childhood and the lives that her father created for himself and his children.

Edition details

• Publisher: Key Porter Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1552631613
• ISBN 13: 9781552631614
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 282