The Diary of a Young Girl
1947 · Anne Frank · 283 pages · Nonfiction
Anne Frank's diary has been read by tens of millions of people since its first publication in 1947, and its power hasn't diminished. What strikes adult readers most forcefully is how ordinary the voice is. Anne is funny, self-aware, petty, romantic, ambitious, and contradictory in exactly the ways a thirteen-year-old girl should be. The horror of the Holocaust enters the diary not as grand historical narrative but as the thing pressing against the walls of a hidden annex where a teenager is trying to grow up. That collision between the mundane and the monstrous is what makes the book devastating and irreplaceable.