A novel about the life of the Freud family’s youngest daughter, Anna. Anna, the ugly duckling of the siblings, Anna the masturbator, the anorexic, the depressive, the homosexual. Yet she was the only one to follow in her illustrious father’s footsteps, joining the Psychoanalytic Society and becoming a child psychoanalyst herself. Exiled to London with her parents to escape the Nazis, she set up a school – one of her homes – a shelter for those left behind by a school system that crushed inventiveness and difference.

One winter’s evening in London in 1946, a nurse rings at the door of the Freuds’ house. Anna, the daughter of the renowned psychoanalyst, is close to death. Feverish and exhausted, she shares with this stranger a series of intimate memories, including of her difficult adolescence, replete with frustrated desires and shameful fantasies, the years of analysis with her father, and her decisive encounter with the larger-than-life Lou Andreas-Salomé. She is by turns the unloved one, the ugly duckling, and the last-born of the litter who struggled so hard to make herself heard while at the same time keeping her love affair with an American woman secret. She also founded a school in Vienna where, as a pioneer of psychoanalysis for children, she incorporated psychoanalytic theory into teaching. Anna Freud was an anti-heroine who resolutely carved out her own path in life and provided a refuge for vulnerable children.

Told with wonderful verve, Les Sept Maisons d’Anna Freud is the deeply moving story of an emancipation and a daughter’s unbridled love for her father, as well as the saga of a family caught up in the torments of war and exile.