Night (1960)

The place most readers begin, and it earns that. Elie Wiesel was 15 when he was deported to Auschwitz, and his account of a son trying to keep his failing father alive through Auschwitz and Buchenwald stays with readers for life. The 1960 English edition ran to just 116 pages: one sitting, though it deserves a pause afterward. Choose the 2006 translation by Marion Wiesel, the author's wife, which arrived with a new preface. The book began as a much longer Yiddish memoir published in Argentina in 1956, which Wiesel cut down into the spare French La Nuit of 1958, and that compression is part of its force.