Isabel Wilkerson follows three people in the Great Migration of six million Black Americans north.
John Hersey follows six survivors through the day of the bomb; the New Yorker gave it a whole issue.
Vasari on Giotto, Leonardo and Michelangelo; art history begins in 1550.
The fall of the Iranian monarchy in 1979 through photographs and fragments; Kapuscinski.
Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer history of the Soviet camps from the archives.
Mukherjee's intimate history of heredity, from Mendel's peas to CRISPR.
What humans will want once famine, plague and war are solved; Harari's sequel.
The 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer who built a hotel beside it.
Mary Beard's thousand years of Rome from a village to an empire, without the togas.
American history from the losers' side, Columbus to Clinton; Zinn's two million copies.
Bill Bryson explains the universe, the atom and the dinosaurs as if to a friend in a pub.
The first month of the First World War day by day; Tuchman's Pulitzer that Kennedy read during the missile crisis.
World history recentred on Persia and Central Asia; Frankopan's bestseller.
Fourteen million killed between Hitler and Stalin in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus; Snyder's map of the killing.
Europe from 1945 to 2005 in one volume; Tony Judt's masterpiece.
A biography of cancer from ancient Egypt to gene therapy; Mukherjee's Pulitzer.
Kapuscinski's first assignments abroad with the first historian in his pocket.
T. E. Lawrence's own account of the Arab Revolt.
Why Eurasia conquered the rest: geography, crops and animals rather than people; Diamond's Pulitzer.
Edward Said on how the West invented the East to rule it.
Shackleton's ship crushed in the ice and every man brought home; Lansing's telling.
Shirer, who was there, on Germany from 1933 to 1945 in 1,200 pages.
The woman whose cells, taken without consent in 1951, are still alive in every lab.
Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.
Haile Selassie's court told by its servants; Kapuscinski on power anywhere.
Kapuscinski's forty years reporting Africa, from Ghana's independence to Rwanda.
Annie Ernaux's life from 1941 to 2006 as a collective French memory in the third person; her Nobel.
Three daughters of China: a warlord's concubine, a communist official and the author, through Mao's century.
Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.
Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.
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