"While sorting through her deceased grandmother's belongings, Alice Stein discovers an unexpected treasure which hints at a family secret. Soon she finds that everyone in the broken New York of the late 1990s is keeping secrets: the undergraduates at NYU where she teaches writing, the mercurial single mother who lives downstairs, and the elusive artist who is the last living link to her grandmother. Her eleven-year-old neighbour becomes her unlikely companion in a quest for resolution. 'It is a joy to be hidden,' D.W. Winnicott writes, and this novel is about the ways we hide from ourselves and from each other, and the long roads we travel in order to find the answers that bring us home."--Back cover.