Hiroshima

I’m going to keep this brief because nothing I can say can really do this book justice. It’s very short (~150 pages), but I kept having to put it down because the writing was so powerful, the stories so sad, and the subject matter so heavy. The book follows a small group of unconnected people (a housewife and her kids, a religious man, a couple doctors, a female plant worker) who had the terrible luck of being within the blast of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb. What they were doing up to the bomb’s detonation, what life was like immediately afterward, and the more long term effects they all suffered from.

It's heartbreaking and pulls no punches. There’s very vivid descriptions of burns, lesions, amputations, infections, and other expected medical effects, which serve to highlight how terrible the whole situation was.

This gets all my stars for the year.