Best of Friends
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Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.
Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.
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Send to friendBest of Friends
This collection with friendship as its theme brings together short stories from a number of contemporary writers whose quality and the range of perspectives on friendship make for an enjoyable sequence. This includes Jan Mark's hint of terrors beneath the mundane and an awareness of the anchored quality of friendship; Theresa Breslin and Ian Strachan showing the friendship of grandchild and grandfather, cutting across generations and helping them to deal with the knowledge and pain of loss; and, from Robert Westall, a terse, sharp moment of uprooting for a child, where the wonders of the new house and independence in the country cannot compensate for the loss of the brick landscape, the landlady and her much loved dog.
