Never Silent: A Hiroshima Survivor's Story

A 2025 EUREKA! Nonfiction Children’s Book Awards Gold Winner!
Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow shares her memories of that horrific event and her resulting lifelong commitment to activism to ban nuclear arms.

When Setsuko Thurlow was thirteen, she witnessed one of history’s most horrific events. She experienced—and survived—the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Since then, she has worked tirelessly to educate people about the catastrophe and to ensure that it never happens again. As a leading member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), she gave the acceptance speech when the organization won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

Never Silent recounts Setsuko’s earliest memories of her happy life in Hiroshima, followed by the devastating firsthand impact she witnesses after the dropping of the atomic bomb, and finally traces the steps she takes to rebuild a life in the aftermath of her experiences. With informational text scattered throughout the book to give historical context for the places and events, readers are given a full and profoundly affecting picture of what it was like after the bomb dropped, the struggle to return to normalcy, and the plea for activism to ban nuclear weapons.

*A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection