Hidden
A Novel
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
As unnerving as it is mesmerizing, Hidden is an evocative, emotionally charged domestic drama -- a willful and traumatized woman's painful search for the truth about the man who assaulted her one summer night.
Six years after the attack, Maggie Wilson receives a call from the prosecutor who helped put her husband in jail after Maggie identified him as the man who nearly killed her. Told that another inmate has confessed to the crime and that her ex-husband will be freed, the shock plunges Maggie into memories of her stormy marriage to Nate Duke, the ambitious heir to a real estate company. Secluded in an old farmhouse that was her marital home, Maggie relives her marriage to Nate and his abusive treatment of her. But in her present, a very different man is haunting her -- the born-again convict who has confessed to the crime. As his story competes with hers, Maggie pores through trial transcripts, old journals, and photo albums, trying fruitlessly to remember exactly what happened.
Written in spare, elegant prose, Paul Jaskunas's novel reads like a waking dream as Maggie is torn by the question -- was it Nate? Or was it this stranger who seems to know intimate details? And what will it cost her to discover the truth? A work of searing suspense written in the heroine's brave voice, Hidden is ultimately about a woman confronting the betrayal of her body and the ambiguity of her mind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Indiana woman whose world was shattered in one fateful night spends the entirety of this meditative literary debut/sleepy thriller unraveling its events. Twenty-two-year-old Maggie's crumbling marriage takes its final blow when she is beaten nearly to death in her idyllic farmhouse, and Nate, her domineering and abusive husband, is put in prison for the crime. Cross-cutting between the mid-1990s, before the assault, and the novel's present in 2002, Jaskunas weaves a complex mystery: though everything Maggie remembers about that night suggests that Nate was the perpetrator, a convict about to be released claims responsibility for the six-year-old crime. When Nate is exonerated, Maggie is thrown into a lonely spiral of self-doubt and confusion. At the heart of this insightful, atmospheric novel are the complexities of truth how much can Maggie trust her own version of events? Jaskunas gracefully evokes the beauty of his rural Indiana setting and the town of New Harmony, where epileptic, solitary Maggie is now the "local eccentric.... the village freak," who must dig into her former life, unearthing denials she had been living all along: "I can see the spot where hung the painting of our perfect home," she says, "the lie that started all the lies."
