Read The Gulag Archipelago

One ordinary day in a Siberian labour camp; the book that told the USSR about the Gulag.

Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.

Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.

Mandela's autobiography from the Transkei to Robben Island to the presidency.

From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.

John Lewis's civil rights years, from Nashville lunch counters to Selma, in three books.

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.