Allen Lane triumphs in nine-way auction for Rebecca Clifford’s The Lingfield Children

Allen Lane has acquired historian Rebecca Clifford’s The Lingfield Children, about nine child survivors of a Nazi ghetto-camp and the orphanage, the “site of a radical experiment in child psychology”, where they ended up.

Casiana Ionita, publishing director at Penguin Press, bought UK and Commonwealth rights in a “hotly contested” nine-way auction from Emma Bal at Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency. Allen Lane in the UK will publish the book in hardback in spring 2027. Rights have also been sold in Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Canada.

The publisher’s description reads: “In December 1945, nine children aged between four and 10 arrived at a country estate in Lingfield, Surrey. They were all survivors of Theresienstadt, a Nazi ghetto-camp not far from Prague where they had spent most of their childhoods. The Lingfield orphanage was many things to its different constituents: to the children it was their home, to its funders it was an early memorial to the Holocaust, but to Anna Freud and her circle, it was the site of a radical experiment in child psychology – an experiment that was exceedingly well documented and unfolded without the children’s knowledge or consent.”

The book is billed as “the story of the home and its inhabitants through the years of its existence and beyond, probing the question of why this one small institution once drew a global gaze, but also why most people today likely have not heard of it.”

Rebecca Clifford is an award-winning historian who has spent 20 years working on different aspects of the memory of the Holocaust. She is professor of European and transnational history at Durham University and her most recent book Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust (Yale University Press) won the Yad Vashem Book Prize and the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards Scholarship Prize and was a finalist for the Cundill History Prize and shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.

Clifford said: “I have been blown away by the interest in The Lingfield Children, and am so excited to be publishing with Allen Lane – no other name is as respected by both discerning readers of history and academic historians. This is in many ways a book that defies easy categorisation: it is a Holocaust history, a history of psychology, and a history of children, all rolled into one. Casiana Ionita understands beautifully how to work with and honour this complexity. I’m so looking forward to our collaboration.”

Ionita said: “I am thrilled to be publishing Rebecca Clifford’s The Lingfield Children, a truly original exploration of a little-known post-war story that will transform our understanding of memory, resilience, and child psychology. Drawing on extensive research and her vast knowledge, Rebecca Clifford offers both a deeply emotional story and a careful re-evaluation of our assumptions about the post-war period. Poignant and unforgettable, The Lingfield Children will transcend categories as a singular book”.