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Back The Hiding Game
Chapters (64)
  1. Cover
  2. Naomi Wood
  3. Dedication page
  4. Epigraph page
  5. 1
  6. WEIMAR, 1922
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  29. DESSAU, 1929
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  44. BERLIN, 1932
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  61. Thank you
  62. Praise
  63. The Hiding Game
  64. Also by Naomi Wood

Thank you to the Literary Encyclopaedia which funded a research trip to Germany; to Goldsmiths College, University of London, for a term of leave to write the first draft; and to all of my colleagues at the University of East Anglia, but specifically Andrew Cowan, who gave me invaluable edits.

The Bauhaus, which celebrates its hundredth birthday in 2019, was an art school of immeasurable productivity, creativity, and joy. Even with its final closure by the Nazis it lived on: in Chicago; in North Carolina’s Black Mountain College; in Tel Aviv. Twenty-first century Bauhäuslers will know there were actually three different ‘Directors’ in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin: Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe. For narrative purposes, I have combined their role into one. Paul’s speech to his class on p177 is in part adapted from Werner David Feist’s memoir ‘My Years at the Bauhaus’ (Meine Jahre am Bauhaus) (Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, 2012).

To find out more about the real-life inspiration for this novel, go to my website at www.naomiwood.com to find photographs of this period and the extraordinary people – Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Anni and Josef Albers, Franz Ehrlich, and Otti Berger – who populate these pages.

Everyone else is a work of my imagination.

Praise

Shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown Award. Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

‘The Hiding Game is extraordinary. Rich, intense, incredible language describing the loyalty and treachery of this group of artists ignoring Hitler’s rise’

Liza Klaussmann, author of Tigers in Red Weather

‘A suspenseful story of obsession against the tense political backdrop of Germany’s Bauhaus art school’

Sunday Times Style

‘Art and ideas have never felt more thrilling . . . Anyone who read Mrs. Hemingway will know how Wood can recreate a time and place with all its glamour and grit’

Grazia

‘Impressive . . . With great conviction, Wood summons up the intensity of the students’ camaraderie and the forces that destroy it’

Sunday Times

‘A novel of delicate menace, in which the gathering weight of personal struggle becomes insidiously roped to the political upheaval of 1930s Germany and its rising fascist forces’

Ross Raisin, author of God’s Own Country

‘Fans of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life will be carried away by the similarly fraught friendships and loving betrayals in Wood’s book’

New Statesman

‘The Hiding Game is a searing and profoundly moving exploration of the things we conceal from others and all that we hide from ourselves . . . A haunting read’

Caroline Lea, author of The Glass Woman

‘Beautifully written’

Scottish Review

‘A love story set in the Bauhaus art school during Germany’s turbulent 1920s? Be still, my pounding heart!’

Sarra Manning, Red magazine

‘Like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Wood’s novel starts out as a chronicle of a death foretold . . . emotionally charged and morally complex’

Literary Review