The Hiding Room

In Cairo in1941, Esta, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, meets and begins an affair with Archie Rawlins, a twenty-two-year-old army intelligence officer. Their relationship, mutually suspicious and tortured in the beginning, becomes in the end an affair of desperate passion. Esta tells Rawlins that she has been an eyewitness to murder and atrocity. Rawlins passes on the information to his superiors only to discover that they are determined to cover up information concerning the plight of the Jews of Europe. He is also told that Esta may belong to a group of Zionist terrorists responsible for the assassination of a senior British diplomat. Who and what should Rawlins believe? The decision that he makes brings fateful consequences to himself and Esta, whose own secrets turn out to be darker than anything Rawlins could have imagined.

"Riveting...Part of Wilson's achievement in this wonderful book is the steadiness with which he moves us back and forth from the 90's to the 40's--each decade imagined so surely, each holding a story so compelling, you resist leaving it."
–Elle

"The rewards of reading Jonathan Wilson's superb novel set in Palestine and Egypt in 1941 are almost equalled by the pleasures of recalling it."
–The Boston Globe

"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."
–Daily Telegraph