I’ve read so many.

On the top of the list of must-reads: Diary of Anne Frank, the unabridged version, Survival in Aushwitz or anything by Primo Levi, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Wall, and City of Thieves by David Benioff. These have it all, unique and compellingly written, with well-developed characters and riveting narratives.

In Stones from the River Ursula Hegi weaves the story of ordinary lives in a German village during extraordinary times, told from the point of view of a dwarf. The Book of Aaron by Jim Shepard is both odd and brilliant. It is not just a good story, but is a masterpiece told from a truly unusual point of view, a difficult protagonist who loses everything. Like all great books, you are drawn into worlds you weren’t aware of before, so much so that you can barely breath.

Anne Michaels adds poetry to sharpen our vision in her novel, Fugitive Pieces:

Time is a blind guide.

 

Bog boy.  I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city.  For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin’s wooden sidewalks.  Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River.  Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.

 

No one is born just once.  If you’re lucky, you’ll emerge again in someone’s arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

 

I squirmed from the marshy ground like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, like the boy they uprooted in the middle of Franz Josef Street while they were repairing the road, six hundred cockleshell beads around his neck, a helmet of mud.  Dripping with the prune-coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Afterbirth of earth.

Also worth a mention and in no particular order:

Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
After Long Silence by Helen Fremont
Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter
The Reader by Benhard Schlink
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
The Book Thief by Markus

I need to reread Maus by Art Spiegelman, Dawn and Night by Elie Wiesel, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, and Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. I want to read Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn, Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, and Those Who Save us by Jenna Blum.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these titles! Leave a comment below and let me know if there are any I missed.