In another buzzed-about pre-Bologna acquisition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children's bought U.S. and Canadian rights to a forthcoming British YA novel called Annexed that tells a famous Holocaust event from the vantage point of an unexpected player. The novel, by Sharon Dogar, recounts the experiences Anne Frank chronicled in her iconic diary from the point of view of Peter van Pels, the teenage boy sharing the attic space where Frank and her family were hiding from the Nazis.
Van Pels is best known to readers as the boy Frank shared her first kiss with and, ultimately, fell in love with. Dogar, a British novelsit and children's psychotherapist, relied on quite a bit of research for the book, which extends beyond the two-year period in hiding, from 1942 to 1944, that Frank wrote about in her diary. Annexed follows van Pels into the concentration camp and also details the fates of the other people who were in that famous attic with him.
Margaret Raymo, editorial director of Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, acquired the book from Sarah Pakenham at Andersen Press in the U.K., and HMH is planning to publish in October 2010.
