Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, published in 1947, chronicles the courageous life of its author, a gifted Jewish teenager after she and her family go into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Anne was eventually arrested and later died, along with most of her family, in a Nazi concentration camp.

Marcel Möring's second novel, Het Grote Verlangen (The Great Longing, 1993), won the AKO Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize. Its narrator, thirty-year-old Sam van Dijk, attempts to remember his past and reestablish ties with his siblings. He lost his memory and was separated from his brother and sister after his parents were killed in an auto accident when he was twelve.

Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex (2002), focuses on the life of a hermaphrodite and the story of her multigenerational Greek-American family as well as her...