Join us for the book launch of Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades. To be launched by Emma Neale
5:30pm–7:00pm
Thursday 18 September 2025
University Book Shop Otago
378 Great King Street
All welcome!
Please RSVP to publicity@otago.ac.nz for catering purposes.
Hiding Places is offbeat, leaky, humorous, fragmented and uncertain of itself. I enjoyed spending time with this spiky narrator: her anxieties, her obsessions, her kleptomania, her failure to comply. She is the bad mother in defiance of Truby King’s alarming and dysfunctional child-rearing rules, quietly rebelling and disintegrating inside a system that still echoes and replicates his admonishments. A fascinating and funny anti-hero.
—Tina MakeretiThis book is so smart. So honest. So funny. So provocative. So humane. So rapturously thoughtful. It is ‘please stop bothering me, I’m reading something really good’ level of good.
— Emilie Pine
About the book
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. Resonant with, yet distinct from, the works of writers like Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, Olga Ravn and Chris Kraus, Hiding Places is an inspiring read for anyone interested in the dangerous yet fruitful zones where life and art overlap.
About the author
Lynley Edmeades has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast and a PhD in avant-garde literature from the University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. Her previous books include As the Verb Tenses (OUP, 2016), Listening In (OUP, 2019) and Bordering on Miraculous, a collaboration with artist Saskia Leek (Massey University Press, 2022). She is the current editor of Landfall Tauraka and teaches English and creative writing at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka.
Find out more about Hiding Places here.