Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl
(Puffin, £4.99)

Frivolity, zits and boyfriend trouble are the subjects of most fictional teenage diaries, but the real things are often born out of more urgent and terrible experiences. The most famous of all is that of Anne Frank, which charts her life in hiding in an Amsterdam warehouse during the Nazi occupation. It is a remarkable document because Anne gives such a remarkably vivid account of her family's struggle to survive and her own growing up, zits and all. The diary breaks off on the day that the family were discovered in August 1944. Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in 1945 just a few months before the end of the war. This is a marvellous, compulsive read that personalises history and allows the reader to understand the fate of the Nazis' six million Jewish victims through the experience of one.

Zlata's Diary
(Puffin, £4.99)

This diary charts a more modern conflict as it details a child's life in Sarajevo as war takes grip. As with Anne Frank's diary, it is notable for the way that ordinary anxieties and pleasures - learning the piano, having a bath - take precedence over the horrors of war. Zlata Filipovic has none of Frank's self-awareness, but this eyewitness account of life in a war zone somehow makes the conflict seem much more real than any TV news footage.

Catherine: The Story of a Young Girl Who Died of Anorexia Nervosa
(Puffin, £4.99)

Catherine: The Story... is written by her mother, Maureen Dunbar, intercut with excerpts from Catherine's own diary. Catherine's despairing and harrowing insights into the tragedy of her own life - in which every mouthful is detailed and each of the 100 laxatives a day she consumes are counted out -tells you more about the trap of the disease than Dunbar's musings.

Witch Child
(Bloomsbury, £10.99)

Fiction can be pretty harrowing too. Celia Rees's book takes the form of a 17th-century journal that 300 years later is found sewn into the lining of a quilt. Mary, a teenager whose grandmother is executed as a witch, writes the diary. Mary escapes out of the frying pan and into the fire, journeying to the New World and Salem. Rees's book is cleverly constructed and written with both grace and urgency as it convincingly charts the psychology and circumstances that engendered witch-hunts.

Everybody Else Does! Why Can't I?
(Piccadilly Press £5.99)

On a lighter note is Yvonne Coppard's entertaining double diary, purportedly written by GCSE student Jenny and her mum. Funnily enough, it is Jenny's voice that seems more authentic of the two.

Teenage Worrier's Panick Diary
(Corgi, £4.99)

Ros Asquith's book towers above all else in this genre. It's partly because her heroine Letty Chubb - worrier, free thinker, bad speller - is no airhead, and partly because Asquith is brilliant on the jokes and the importance of snogging. Yet she also places Letty firmly in the real world where there are wars going on and refugees sitting at the next desk. It is done with the lightest and wittiest of touches.