Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman is an American novelist born in New York City on March 16, 1952. She grew up on Long Island and studied at Adelphi University, later receiving an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her first novel, Property Of, was published in 1977. From the outset, Hoffman combined recognizable American settings with heightened or fantastic elements, a tendency that became especially visible in her later fiction.

Her 1995 novel Practical Magic follows the Owens sisters, Sally and Gillian, descendants of women associated with witchcraft. The book centers on family, love, fear, and the social consequences of being marked as different in a small Massachusetts town. It was adapted into the 1998 film Practical Magic, directed by Griffin Dunne and starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Hoffman later returned to this fictional family in The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons, and The Book of Magic, expanding the Owens history across different generations.

Hoffman’s 1997 novel Here on Earth reworks ideas associated with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, placing a destructive reunion in contemporary Massachusetts. In 2004, her novel The River King used a New England boarding school and a student’s death to build a mystery about secrecy, class, and institutional power. The Dovekeepers, published in 2011, is set against the Roman siege of Masada in the first century. It tells its story through four women—Yael, Revka, Aziza, and Shirah—whose lives converge at the desert fortress. The novel was selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, bringing it to a broad television and reading audience.

Hoffman has also written extensively for younger readers. Her novel Aquamarine, about two girls who meet a mermaid named Aquamarine, was adapted as a 2006 film. In 2001 she published the young-adult novel Green Angel, a spare post-disaster story about a girl named Green after her family is killed. The sequel, Green Witch, continued that character’s story. Her books for younger audiences also include the young-adult novel Incantation, set in seventeenth-century Spain and focused on Estrella, a converso girl.

Her bibliography ranges from adult historical fiction and contemporary tales to work for children and teenagers. Across these books, she repeatedly uses women’s lives, families, grief, and survival as narrative centers. Her career includes screen adaptations and sequels that show how particular invented worlds have remained important to readers. Rather than being confined to one genre, Hoffman has built a body of work spanning magical realism, historical fiction, mystery, romance, and young-adult storytelling. Her later Owens novels demonstrate her interest in revisiting characters from new chronological perspectives.