When the first atom bomb was dropped on 6th August 1945, it devastated a great city and knocked Japan out of the war. John Hersey, an American writer, was sent nine months later to Hiroshima to find out, in human and not scientific terms, what had happened.
His narrative, which is built round the experiences of six survivors in a city where some 100,000 men, women and children were killed, supplies an epitaph to those who died in one of history's most catastrophic events and a grave warning to the present and the future.