Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is a 1977 children's historical novel by the Canadian-American author Eleanor Coerr, based on the life of Sadako Sasaki, a girl from Hiroshima who was in the city when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. It is written for readers of about Sadako's own age.

By the time she is twelve, Sadako is gravely ill with leukaemia, which the book calls the atom bomb disease. She is athletic and her life is organised around school and running, so the illness takes away the thing she is best at as well as her health. The legend of the thousand cranes gives her something to do with the time: she folds, and her family and classmates fold with her.

Coerr wrote the book as fiction for younger readers rather than as a biography, and the historical background is worn lightly. Its subject is a child's illness and the family around her, with the bombing present as the cause rather than as the event the story describes, and the cranes themselves became a way for other children to remember her.