HIDE IN PLACE – the new novel by Emilya Naymark

She left the NYPD in the firestorm of a high-profile case gone horribly wrong. Three years later, the ghosts of her past roar back to terrifying life.

When NYPD undercover cop Laney Bird’s cover is blown in a racketeering case against the Russian mob, she flees the city with her troubled son, Alfie. Now, three years later, she’s found the perfect haven in Sylvan, a charming town in upstate New York.

But then the unthinkable happens: her boy vanishes.

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Length Matters: How Many Words Does It Take?

How long is a sentence? The answer I got in junior high school was “long enough to finish the thought.” Cheeky.

For years, the longest sentence ever written in English was said to be Molly Bloom’s 3,687-word soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922). However, one of the finalists for the 2019 Booker Prize was Lucy Ellman, whose 1,000-page Ducks, Newburyport consists mostly of a single sentence that runs to 426,000 words. Beat that if you can.

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The Worst-case Scenario

Reading about horrible things help us deal with them IRL.

From ancient myths to fairy tales to epic poems and literature of every era and genre, it’s the worst-case scenario that glues us to the page/stage/screen. We shudder and close our eyes trying to imagine what it’s like to go into battle or to lose someone we love. The story takes us by the hand and lets us live through the tension and fear, then lets us out at the end, still whole, our lives still intact.

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