by Monica Hesse
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing is a sort of lonely process, because at the end of the day only one pair of hands can fit on a laptop, and most of the time—at least midproject—I wish they were anyone’s but mine. For this book, I am grateful for the people who symbolically shared the keyboard and made writing feel like a team sport.
My agent, Ginger Clark, read three paragraphs of an early plot description and immediately informed me that the book I was describing should be about teenagers, rather than the adults I’d been envisioning. She was right, as she is about most things.
My editor, Lisa Yoskowitz, was instrumental in suggesting so many plot and character developments that I hesitate to enumerate them here, lest I reveal myself to be a total idiot.
Robert Cox, my husband, offered scrupulous notes over multiple drafts, and pancakes at IHOP when they became necessary. I could not have asked for a smarter reader or a better partner.
It’s daunting, and perhaps a little presumptuous, to try to tell a story about a culture and time that don’t belong to you. But I knew from the beginning that I wanted this story to be set in Amsterdam, in World War II, and I wanted it to feel authentically Dutch. Getting the dates and geography right was one thing, but getting the Dutch sensibility right required an entirely different level of nuance. And so I am grateful to the tour guide in Amsterdam who first introduced me to the phrase “God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.” I am grateful to the cyclists in the city who gently chided me when I misunderstood the rules of bicycle culture. I am grateful for Amsterdam’s exhaustive, absorbing museum collections, and for the private citizens who bothered to create websites—in English!—on topics ranging from the proper pronunciation of Dutch names to the fate of each naval torpedo ship during the German invasion.
I am deeply grateful, on a literary and on a humanistic level, for the Dutch resistance workers who later wrote about their experiences, which provided such rich, textured accounts of a time and place. Reading the memoirs of Miep Gies, Corrie ten Boom, Hanneke Ippisch, and Diet Eman, among others, taught me a great deal about what it felt like to live through World War II in Amsterdam. And finally: So much of what the world knows about the war, the city, and the human experience is because of one particular book, written from an attic, in the middle of the occupation. I am most profoundly grateful to Anne.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Monica Hesse (monicahesse.com) is an author and journalist with the Washington Post. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and their dog.
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
JANUARY 1943 ONE: Tuesday
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN: Wednesday
EIGHT
NINE: Thursday
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN: Friday
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN: Saturday
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE: Monday
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE: Wednesday
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE: Saturday
THIRTY-FOUR
A NOTE ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Monica Hesse
Title page photo © Popartic/Shutterstock
Cover filmstrip image © iStock.com/Gordon 1
Cover image of girl © Stephen Carroll/Trevillion Images
Cover image of city © Miguel Mascaro Manzanero/Arcangel
Cover design by Maggie Edkins
Cover © 2016 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
First ebook edition: April 2016
ISBN 978-0-316-26064-0
E3