Hiroshima

Hiroshima (1946 and 1985) is journalist John Hersey’s classic account of six survivors of the 1945 atom bomb attack on Japan. Amid the wreckage, these six lived to offer their accounts of the devastating experience.

• History devotees
• Character-driven non-fiction (or fiction) enthusiasts
• Budding journalists

John Hersey, an American journalist, was born in China in 1914 and lived in the US from 1925. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, A Bell for Adano, in 1945, but Hiroshima was his biggest success. He mostly concentrated on writing fiction, alongside teaching at Yale, his alma mater.