When You Listen to This Song

Lola Lafon is a French writer who grew up in Eastern Europe and studied dance and music in Paris and New York. Her prizewinning books include The Little Communist Who Never Smiled and Reeling: A Novel. She lives in Paris, France. Lauren Elkin is a French and American writer and translator. She is the author of several books, including Flâneuse and Scaffolding, and lives in London, UK.

“More than Lafon’s elegant recapitulation of the facts, what’s interesting here is how she constructs a labyrinth of looping, interlocked narratives which spiral out beyond the Annex as the night progresses. . . . The penultimate pages of this elegiac book are a sword-thrust to the heart.”—Laurel Berger, Irish Times“An indispensable guide to the afterlife of the death of ‘that man’, a story which, fully 70 years after its belated confirmation, only seems likely to continue.”—Paul Moore, History TodayLonglisted for the National Translation Award in Prose, sponsored by ALTA“Lola Lafon’s book is an unusually haunting meditation on history, memory, and what the living owe to the dead, via a uniquely personal immersion in the story of Anne Frank.”—Ruth Franklin, author of The Many Lives of Anne Frank“This book brings Anne Frank to life not as a victim, but as a writer. In meditating on Frank’s genius, Lafon lets us into writing’s intent: ‘We write . . . to lay hold of reality.’”—Darcey Steinke, author of This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith“Lola Lafon’s memoiristic meditation sneaks up on us with a quiet but distinct emotional and intellectual intensity. Rather than narrate in booming voiceover the familiar story of the very famous and doomed Anne Frank, Lafon slips in through a much more interesting writerly side entrance, as she prepares herself for an unlikely sort of sleepover with the dead.”—Adina Hoffman, author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New CityAccolades for the French edition:Grand prix des lectrices de Elle, Prix Décembre, and Prix Les Inrockuptibles