Hidden River

by Sara Lippmann

Thirty-five year old Cassandra (aka Cass, Cassie, Cassidy, and Cassiopeia) Trout is going nowhere fast. Stuck in her hometown of Philadelphia, she spends her lackluster days working retail and running, and then rinse, repeat. But a surprise wedding invitation from an estranged childhood friend is set to change all that.



Sally Sellers has made it big in London and is eager to flesh out her guest list. Cass and Sally were once inseparable, sharing everything from boys to beds. But secrets polluted their friendship—particularly Cass's illicit entanglement with Sally's father, Len, which began in adolescence, and ended with his untimely death. Will the wedding finally force Cass to reckon with her painful, hidden past? Can she heal well enough to truly grow into her own adulthood? And what does healing look like when the most damaging memories are also the ones that last?



Sara Lippmann’s Hidden River is an unforgettable masterwork by a writer at the top of her game. With a timeline that toggles between the summer of 2008 and the late 80s/early 90s, this lean but bold novel casts an intimate look at grooming in the era before #metoo. A fascinating blend of tragedy and dark comedy, a work of brutal emotional truths unearthed with lightness and grace, this exquisitely charged story, at once private and political, will linger in your mind—and earn a place in your heart.

Genres: Fiction

244 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication May 5, 2026

About the author

Sara Lippmann is the author of the novels Lech and Hidden River and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor in chief of Epiphany magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Anna Persky]

Review to follow.

[Sarah Holloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

You'll want to read this when it is published in May!

[Shayne Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Signature Lippmann! Fearlessly handles the complicated underbelly of human relationships, prose like an x-acto knife. Highly recommend.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is my book. i wrote it. i’ll rate it.

[Rachel León · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in the summer of 2008 with flashbacks from the late 80s/ early 90s, Hidden River is an unsentimental atmospheric exploration of trauma, grooming, gender and power dynamics consent, and memory written with Lippmann’s singular voice.