Luise has ringlets. Lottie has braids. Apart from that they look exactly the same. But they are sure that they have never set eyes on each other in their lives. When the two girls meet at a summer camp and discover the secret behind their similarity, they decide to switch places. Everyone is fooled (apart from the dog) and, despite a few mistakes and misadventures, everything goes to plan for Luise as Lottie and Lottie as Luise - until their father meets a young, beautiful woman and things start to unravel... Funny, moving, affectionate and improbable, The Parent Trap has twice been adapted for film - but the book remains one of the great classics of German children's literature.

 

This book was published 2014 by Pushkin Children's Books .

Anthea Bellwas awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (USA) in 2002 for her translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz . Her many works of translation from French and German (for which she has received several other awards) include the Nicholas books and, with Derek Hockridge, the entire Asterix the Gaul saga by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. Erich Kastner was born in Dresden in 1899. He began his career as a journalist for the New Leipzig newspaper in 1922, but moved to Berlin in 1927 to begin working as a freelance journalist and theatre critic. In 1929 he published his first book for children, Emil and the Detectives, which has since been translated into 60 languages, achieving international recognition and selling millions of copies around the world. He subsequently published both Dot and Anton and The Flying Classroom, before turning to adult fiction with his 1931 satire Going to the Dogs. After the Nazis took power in Germany, Kastner's books were burnt on Berlin's Opera Square and over the period of 1937-42 he faced repeated arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo, resulting in his blacklisting and exclusion from the writers' guild. After the end of World War II, Kastner moved to Munich and published The Parent Trap, later adapted into a hit film by Walt Disney. In 1957 he received the Georg Buchner Prize and, later, the Order of Merit and the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for his contribution to children's literature. Kastner died in Munich in 1974. Walter Trier was born in Prague in 1890, but moved to Berlin in 1910. An acclaimed cartoonist and illustrator, he collaborated with Kastner on more than a dozen children's books and produced covers for Lilliput and The New Yorker, among others. He fled Germany in 1936, and eventually settled in Canada, where he died in 1951. Erich Kastner was a German author, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known primarily for his humorous, socially astute poems and for children's books including his most famous series which began with Emil and the Detectives.