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.
Knausgaard's father, alcohol and the cleaning of a house of death; 3,600 pages begin.
Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.
Saint-Exupery flying the mail over the Sahara and the Andes, and crashing in the Libyan desert.
Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.
Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.
Orwell as a dishwasher and a tramp; poverty from the inside.
Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.
Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.
Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.
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