6 books like The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, from Zlata's Diary to The Book Thief: young voices facing war with honesty and hope.
Updated June 10, 2026
Anne Frank's diary endures because it is not really a book about the Holocaust; it is a book written inside it. From July 1942 to August 1944, a teenager hiding with seven other people in a concealed Amsterdam annex recorded the small frictions of confinement, her arguments with her mother, her first kiss, her ambitions to be a writer, all while the war pressed in through the radio and the bombing raids. The power is the mismatch: an ordinary adolescent voice, funny and self-critical and alive, set against what the reader knows is coming. No retelling has ever matched that immediacy, because Anne did not know how her story ended.
Nothing replaces it, but the books below each carry one of its threads forward. Two are real diaries and memoirs by girls in danger: Zlata's Diary, written by a child in besieged Sarajevo who was directly compared to Anne Frank at the time, and I Am Malala, the account of a Pakistani teenager who was shot for going to school. Three are novels of young people in World War II, from Liesel in The Book Thief to the deportation story of Between Shades of Gray and the gentler Number the Stars. The last, The Things They Carried, is the outlier: an adult book about Vietnam, here for readers ready to follow the question of how anyone writes truthfully about war.
A note on age range, since this list spans a wide one. Number the Stars is written for roughly ages 9 to 12, Zlata's Diary and I Am Malala suit middle schoolers and up, The Book Thief and Between Shades of Gray are young adult novels that adults read in large numbers, and The Things They Carried is an adult book with graphic violence and language. Pick according to who is doing the reading.
Read this if you want Anne's world from the other side of the German border.
Markus Zusak's novel is the most common recommendation after Anne Frank's diary, and the connection is more than setting. Liesel Meminger is a foster child in a small town outside Munich during the same years Anne was writing, and her family hides a Jewish man, Max, in their basement, which gives the book its own version of the annex: the whispered friendship, the constant fear of discovery, the way words become survival. Liesel steals books and learns to read by them; Anne wrote one. Both stories insist that a child's inner life keeps mattering even when history is trying to erase it.
The differences are large and worth knowing going in. This is fiction, narrated by Death itself, a device that announces upcoming losses in advance and gives the book a stylized, lyrical quality far from the diary's plainness. It is also long, around 550 pages, and openly devastating where Anne's diary breaks off in silence. Choose it when you are ready for a novel that dramatizes what the diary made you feel; it earns its tears honestly.
Read this if what moved you was a real girl refusing to be silenced.
Malala Yousafzai is the closest thing the twenty-first century has produced to Anne Frank's voice: a teenage girl writing under an occupying force about her right to an ordinary life. Malala began by blogging anonymously for the BBC at age eleven about life under the Taliban in Pakistan's Swat Valley, and in 2012, at fifteen, she was shot in the head on her school bus for it. Her memoir, written with journalist Christina Lamb, covers her family, her valley, and her recovery. Like the diary, it pairs adolescent normalcy (exams, rivalries, a love of pink) with extraordinary danger.
The crucial difference is that Malala survived, and knew her audience. The memoir is shaped, retrospective, and at times advocacy as much as autobiography, where Anne's diary is raw and private by nature. It also includes a fair amount of Pakistani history and politics that younger readers may skim. Pick it for proof that Anne's central faith, that words from one girl can outweigh armies, has a living example, one who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize at seventeen.
Read this for a younger reader meeting this history for the first time.
Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal winner is the natural companion for readers around ages 9 to 12, and it tells the hopeful chapter of the same story. Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen helps her best friend Ellen Rosen pose as her sister when the Nazis begin rounding up Denmark's Jews in 1943, and the plot follows the real Danish rescue, in which ordinary citizens ferried more than 7,000 Jews to safety in Sweden. Where Anne's helpers could only hide her, Denmark's helpers got most of their neighbors out, and Lowry builds her story on that true act of collective courage.
It is deliberately gentler than the diary: short, fast, focused on bravery and friendship, with the worst horrors kept offstage. Adult readers will finish it in an evening and may find it slight next to Anne's voice. That is the point. It is the book to hand a child who has just read or is about to read the diary, because it answers the question the diary raises so painfully, whether anyone helped, with a true story where the answer was yes.
Read this only if you are ready for an adult book about how war stories get told.
This is the outlier on the list, and the honest framing is that it connects to Anne Frank by theme rather than subject. Tim O'Brien's linked stories about a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam are obsessed with the same problem the diary embodies: how writing carries the weight of unbearable experience. O'Brien blurs memoir and fiction on purpose, arguing that a story's emotional truth can matter more than its facts, and his catalog of what soldiers carried, physical and otherwise, has the same accumulating power as Anne's inventory of life in the annex.
Everything else is different. The narrators are grown men doing the fighting rather than a child hiding from it, the violence is graphic, and the moral ground is deliberately murky; there is no innocence here, only the memory of it. This is a standard text in American high schools and beyond, but it is not a book for the younger readers this list otherwise serves. Pick it up later, when your interest has shifted from Anne's story to the larger question of why we write about war at all.
Read this for the deportation story the war's western histories usually skip.
Ruta Sepetys's novel follows fifteen-year-old Lina, seized from her home in Lithuania in June 1941 when Stalin's forces deported hundreds of thousands of Baltic citizens, and shipped with her mother and brother toward a Siberian labor camp. Like Anne, Lina is a teenage girl with an artist's vocation (she draws compulsively, hiding her work, as Anne hid her pages) whose ordinary adolescence is severed mid-sentence by a totalitarian state. Sepetys, whose own father's family fled Lithuania, built the book from survivor interviews, and it reads with documentary weight.
The differences: this is fiction, it is about Soviet rather than Nazi terror, and it does not stay in one hiding place; it is a journey narrative through cattle cars, beet farms, and the Arctic. It is also more physically harrowing on the page than the diary, which recorded fear more than violence. Choose it if the diary left you wanting to understand the war's other captivities, and note that the title has nothing to do with the similarly named romance novel; the confusion is common and unfortunate.
Read this for the real diary written by a girl the world called a modern Anne Frank.
This is the most direct match on the list, because it is the same kind of document. Zlata Filipovic was ten when she began her diary in Sarajevo in 1991, writing about piano lessons, school, and MTV; within months the siege began, and the diary turns to shelling, snipers, dead friends, and life without water or electricity. She had read Anne Frank, names her diary as Anne named hers Kitty (Zlata calls hers Mimmy), and was uneasily aware of the comparison journalists drew while she was still trapped in the city. The diary was published in 1993 and helped get her family evacuated to Paris.
Two honest caveats. Zlata was younger than Anne and writing for a shorter span, so the diary has less of the introspection and self-portraiture that make Anne's book literature; it is a child's record, vivid but simpler. And unlike Anne, Zlata survived, which changes the reading experience entirely, from grief to relief. It is the right next book for a young reader who wants to see that children kept witnessing, and surviving, wars that came after.
What is the closest real book to The Diary of a Young Girl?
Zlata's Diary is the nearest equivalent: an actual diary kept by a girl, Zlata Filipovic, during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, written partly in conscious imitation of Anne Frank. For a modern memoir with the same spirit of a girl's voice against oppression, I Am Malala is the strongest true story, though it is a retrospective memoir rather than a diary.
What should a middle schooler read after Anne Frank's diary?
Number the Stars is the gentlest companion for ages 9 to 12 and tells the true-based story of Denmark's rescue of its Jews. Zlata's Diary and I Am Malala both work well for middle school. The Book Thief and Between Shades of Gray are best for around age 13 and up, and The Things They Carried is an adult book that should wait for high school.
Is The Book Thief similar to Anne Frank's diary?
They pair naturally but are very different kinds of book. The Book Thief is a novel set in Nazi Germany, narrated by Death, about a foster girl whose family hides a Jewish man, so it echoes the diary's themes of hiding, words, and endangered childhood. The diary is a real document with no narrator between you and Anne. Many readers find the novel hits harder emotionally precisely because it can show the ending the diary cannot.
Did Anne Frank's diary really survive unedited?
The diary survived because Miep Gies, one of the family's helpers, gathered the pages after the arrest in August 1944 and kept them unread until Otto Frank, Anne's father and the annex's only survivor, returned. Otto edited the first published edition in 1947, trimming passages about Anne's sexuality and her conflicts with her mother. Later editions, usually labeled the Definitive Edition, restore most of that material, and it is the version worth reading today.
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