Ariela Freedman – Book Club with the Author

Please join us for the latest iteration of our Book Club with the Author, where a local Montreal author joins us to discuss their book! This time, we’ll be discussing A Joy to be Hidden by author Ariela Freedman. As with all our book clubs, we recommend reading the book in advance, but you are welcome to attend as long as you are all right with spoilers.

About the author:
Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2014 Mentorship Program. She has a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches literature at Concordia’s Liberal Arts College in Montreal, where she lives with her husband and two sons. Her first novel, Arabic for Beginners, was shortlisted for the QWF/Concordia first book prize, and won the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Fiction in 2018. A Joy to Be Hidden (2019) is her second novel.

About the book:
A Joy To Be Hidden is set in a vividly recreated late-90s New York City. The protagonist is Alice Stein, a graduate student whose father died a year before, and who has now lost her grandmother. In the process of sorting through the grandmother’s belongings, Alice unlocks a family secret. In addition to its wisdom and rich humour, the novel is full of memorable characters. We can never quite forget the title quote–“It Is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found” (D. W. Winnicott)–and we discover, over the course of the novel, that it applies to all its characters.