The Book Thief

**Author:** Markus Zusak **Estimated Reading Time:** 28 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The power of words to destroy and to save, the quiet heroism of ordinary people in extraordinary evil, and the ways love persists in the shadow of death.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who believe stories can hold the weight of history, who want to understand how ordinary Germans lived through the Nazi years, and anyone who has ever found salvation in a book.

There are stories that arrive like weather, changing the atmosphere of a room. Then there are stories that arrive like a voice in the dark, intimate and unmistakable, and you know within the first few sentences that you will never forget the sound of them. The Book Thief is that second kind of story. It begins with a confession. The narrator is Death, and Death is tired. Not the hooded figure of medieval paintings, not the grinning skeleton of Halloween, but a weary, overworked presence that has been collecting human souls for longer than memory can reach. Death has seen every kind of ending a human being can meet. It has gathered souls from battlefields and hospitals, from sinking ships and burning cities. It has learned to distract itself with colors, to focus on the sky at the moment of each departure rather than the faces of the dying. And yet, in all that endless work, one story has stayed with Death more than any other. It belongs to a girl who stole books. The girl is Liesel Meminger, and when Death first meets her, she is nine years old, standing beside a railway line in the snow, watching her younger brother being buried. She does not know yet that she will lose everything. She does not know that she will be delivered to strangers on a street called Himmel, which means heaven, in a town called Molching, which will one day be bombed to rubble. She does not know that she will steal books from fires and from libraries, that she will hide a Jewish man in her basement, that she will learn to read by lamplight while the world outside burns. She does not know that words will become her weapon and her refuge, her curse and her salvation. Markus Zusak wrote this novel from stories his parents told him. His mother and father grew up in Germany and Austria during the war. They remembered the bombings, the hunger, the fear, the small acts of courage and cruelty that marked those years. Zusak grew up in Sydney, Australia, thousands of miles and decades away from that world, but the stories stayed with him. He knew he wanted to write about that…