Amanda Mason was born and brought up in Whitby, North Yorkshire. She studied Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, where she began writing by devising and directing plays. After a few years earning a very irregular living in lots of odd jobs, and performing in a comedy street magic act, she became a teacher, and has worked in the UK, Italy, Spain and Germany. She now lives in North Yorkshire and has given up teaching for writing.

Her short stories have been published in several anthologies, including collections from Parthian Books, Unthank Books, and The Fiction Desk and her debut novel, The Wayward Girls was published in 2019. The Hiding Place is her second novel.

Letter from Author

Hello,

Thank you for picking up The Hiding Place, I hope you enjoyed it.

The practice of placing objects in a building to protect it is a very old one and I’m fascinated by this sort of superstition; the idea that a certain action, or habit, or even the right words in the right order can protect a person from harm. These concealed objects can be bits of clothing, sometimes they are mummified cats, but most often they are shoes. It’s such a personal kind of magic, the rules are rarely written down, and what’s left behind are incredibly ambiguous objects which accumulate an odd sort of power in and of themselves. They can remain undisturbed for centuries; once they are found, we can only guess at the intentions of the person who hid them away. And that is really where The Hiding Place began.

I wanted to write about this rough, informal magic that seems once to have been a part of everyday life. Why would someone hide a shoe, a child’s shoe in particular? What might they have hoped to gain? What were they afraid of? If you found one in your house, what other secrets might you unearth? What does a child’s shoe mean to a mother, or to someone struggling with motherhood?

I knew I wanted to write a book about mothers and daughters, and I knew that the central character would be someone who very much wanted to have her own baby. For a while Nell was alone in Elder House, but the story came to life for me when I thought about how there is more than one way of being a mother, and that being a step-parent might have its own conflict and stresses. Motherhood, in any form, is hardly a simple thing. I knew that Nell was going to meet someone from her old life, and I became interested in the battles that this character, Carolyn, has with her teenage daughter, Evie. What might she have sacrificed to become a mother? Had it been worth it? And all the time, I was thinking about a little shoe, hidden in a bedroom wall. What did the shoe mean in the past, and what does it mean now?