Universal History ArchiveGetty Images As a child who enjoyed scanning books on shelves more than actually reading them, the spine of one Penguin Classic in our dining room stood out. Hiroshima by John Hersey. Here was a real-life published author with the same surname as mine, and to a nine-year-old who’d never come across another Hersey in the wild, this was an intoxicating discovery. I should point out that the entertainment benchmark was considerably lower in 1986. I hoped the good-looking Ivy League professor might be a distant relative on the American branch. The faded cover and yellowing pages told me it was old, though, and old meant obscure. The single word title, too, was definitely a turn-off. I already knew Hiroshima as a byword for horror on a scale it was best not to think about. How could a paperback this slim hope to cover it? And when a whole city is obliterated under a mushroom cloud, are there even any stories left to tell?