The World That We Knew

In The World That We Knew (2019), master storyteller and lyric stylist Alice Hoffman explores the difficult history of Nazi Germany and the struggle of oppressed Jewish people for dignity in the face of the Holocaust’s brutality and inhumanity. A work of historical fiction, the novel chronicles the heroic adventures of three courageous Jewish girls in occupied France. Hoffman freely mingles the hard realities of war with stunning, elegant touches of magic and the supernatural. This fusion in turn sustains a tender and inspirational environment of possibility that celebrates the triumph of love and compassion against the grim tyranny of fascism, violence, religious intolerance, and hate.

Hoffman has written more than 30 novels. Most have been New York Times best sellers, many were selected by the prestigious Oprah’s Book Club, and some were developed into major studio films. The World That We Knew received the 2020 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a $10,000 international humanitarian award named for the historic accord signed in Dayton that brought an end to the bloody Serbian civil war in 1995. The prize—whose previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel—has been presented annually since 2006 to recognize works of fiction and nonfiction that assert the power of the word to promote peace and encourage a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, and nations as well as other political and religious views.