Novel charts life of Anne Frank before she went into hiding

A novel about Anne Frank's life before she went into hiding, published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House, will be published this year.

- Ella Creamer

When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary by Alice Hoffman tells Frank's story from the moment the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 to when her family went into hiding in the annexe of her father's office building in Amsterdam in July 1942. The novel includes archival material provided by the Anne Frank House, a museum that now occupies the building.

Hoffman has written more than 40 novels including Practical Magic and The Dovekeepers. She said that she discovered The Diary of a Young Girl when she was 12, and that it had affected her "more than any other" book. "It changed the way I looked at the world. It changed the person I was and the person I would become.