Hidden River - by Sara Lippmann (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Thirty-five year old Cassandra (aka Cass, Cassie, Cassidy, and Cassiopeia) Trout is going nowhere fast. Stuck in her hometown of Philadelphia, she spends her lackluster days working retail and running, and then rinse, repeat. But a surprise wedding invitation from an estranged childhood friend is set to change all that.

Sally Sellers has made it big in London and is eager to flesh out her guest list. Cass and Sally were once inseparable, sharing everything from boys to beds. But secrets polluted their friendship--particularly Cass's illicit entanglement with Sally's father, Len, which began in adolescence, and ended with his untimely death. Will the wedding finally force Cass to reckon with her painful, hidden past? Can she heal well enough to truly grow into her own adulthood? And what does healing look like when the most damaging memories are also the ones that last?

Sara Lippmann's Hidden River is an unforgettable masterwork by a writer at the top of her game. With a timeline that toggles between the summer of 2008 and the late 80s/early 90s, this lean but bold novel casts an intimate look at grooming in the era before #metoo. A fascinating blend of tragedy and dark comedy, a work of brutal emotional truths unearthed with lightness and grace, this exquisitely charged story, at once private and political, will linger in your mind--and earn a place in your heart.

Review Quotes

"Crisp and unsettling...Readers will admire this gritty slice of life."

-- Publishers Weekly

"Lippmann's novel is a breathtaking portrait of a person on the brink of healing from trauma."

-- Booklist

"This book is so human it aches. And propulsive and breathless, I kept having to force myself to slow down and just enjoy the torque of the sentences. No writer combines grief-struck with funny like Lippmann."

-- Peter Orner, author of The Gossip Columnist's Daughter

"Cass, the narrator of Sara Lippmann's absorbing new novel, tells her trying-to-come-of-age story in a series of deftly sketched scenes. Hers is a voice that doesn't let you go. Cass may be damaged by a long-kept secret, but she's a smart and knowing survivor--a tough-minded ideal guide to her own hidden river."

-- David Gates, author of Jernigan, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Unflinchingly unsentimental yet profoundly moving, Hidden River is a restrained and subtle novel about the cost of trauma, the cumulative power of minute, incremental change, and the infinite shades of gray in the lives of a victim, her abuser, and his enablers. I am a sucker for Sara Lippmann and her singularly inventive, sharp-edged prose."

-- Rachel Lyon, author of Fruit of the Dead and Self-Portrait with Boy

"In a voice as sharp-edged as it is rueful, as slyly funny as it is wounding, Lippmann explores the confounding ambiguities and shattering transgressions at the heart of this beautifully provocative novel. Boundaries in friendship and family are irreversibly crossed and questions of the past haunt the book's present, refusing to be outrun. Hidden River, subtly and deeply, is a true page-turner, propelled by Lippmann's fluid yet arresting prose and the way she captures the quiet suspense involved in re-making a life."

-- Deborah Shapiro, author of Consolation and The Sun in Your Eyes

"Trauma is the river that winds its way through Sara Lippmann's haunting new novel. When a wedding invitation from an old friend arrives, Cassandra is forced to confront her past and the ways it has prevented her from truly moving on. Lippmann writes about the lingering effects of abuse with a light touch, expertly revealing the ways it pulses beneath the surface, threatening to drag us under."
-- Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year

"In Hidden River, Sara Lippmann once again drops the reader into the nasty part of existence, ripping open our hearts to see all the liquid, dark bloodiness inside of it. Here it all is, unvarnished and painful, all seen through the eyes of one Cassie Trout, a stayer to her mother's unmooredness, a cynic with a soft delicate core, showing us how hard it is to get up and do things while we carry atrocious truths in our every cell. Lippmann writes like no other, and it is her voice and her voice only that can tell the story of Cassie, of her brokenness, and her strength and her tiny joys, the ones that count, her moons and stars in a world forever mad and cruel."
-- Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker

About the Author

SARA LIPPMANN is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible from SUNY Press. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.