THE SECRET LIFE OF HIDDEN PLACES - out now
The Secret Life of Hidden Places: Concealed Rooms, Clandestine Passageways, and the Curious Minds That Made Them, April Genevieve Tucholke’s and my investigation of architectural secrets across the globe, is out today!
Are you one of those curious souls who always needs to know what’s behind that locked door, inside that chest, over that wall, inside that spooky mansion, down those cellar stairs, or in that cave? Better yet, are you one of those curious souls who doesn’t actually want to risk life and limb traveling far and wide, finagling one’s way into difficult-to-reach locations, and scouring archives for juicy anecdotes, and would rather gather information from a safe distance? Then this is the book for you. A compendium of secret rooms, hidden passageways, and other strange and wondrous architectural anomalies, their histories, and most intriguingly, the stories of the ones who built them and what they were trying to hide.
Some of the chapter topics include:
The thirteen mysterious labyrinths on a remote Russian island
An underground manor in England
The illegal alchemy laboratories of old
The secrets of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles
The history of hidden speakeasies in the United States
A temple full of traps in Japan
A vast Dutch dollhouse with a hidden room
16th century tunnels beneath Mexican cities
And many, many more…
The book is chock-full of color photography, anecdotes, and history. It was so much fun to write, and I hope you’ll love to read it, too.
(Note that it is a book for adults, not for young readers like my previous books.)
