Read Night

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.

Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.

Annie Ernaux's life from 1941 to 2006 as a collective French memory in the third person; her Nobel.

Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.

Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.

A boy in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, drawn by a survivor; the manga on the bomb.

Viktor Frankl in Auschwitz and the psychology he built from it; those with a why can bear any how.