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Published: September 2007
For Ages: 12+ years old

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It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word – Kommunist – and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.

So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

The Book Thief is a story about the power of words to make worlds. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

About the Author

Markus Zusak lives in Sydney with his wife. He has written four novels for young adults: The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, When Dogs Cry and The Messenger. This is his first adult novel.

"Brilliant and hugely ambitious...Some will argue that a book so difficult and sad may not be appropriate for teenage readers...Adults will probably like it (this one did), but it's a great young-adult novel...It's the kind of book that can be life-changing, because without ever denying the essential amorality and randomness of the natural order, "The Book Thief" offers us a believable hard-won hope...The hope we see in Liesel is unassailable, the kind you can hang on to in the midst of poverty and war and violence. Young readers need such alternatives to ideological rigidity, and such explorations of how stories matter. And so, come to think of it, do adults."-"New York Times, "May 14, 2006
""The Book Thief"is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but "The Book Thief" deserves a place on the same shelf with "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's "Night." It seems poised to become a classic."
- "USA Today
"
"Zusak doesn't sugarcoat anything, but he makes his ostensibly gloomy subject bearable the same way Kurt Vonnegut did in "Slaughterhouse-Five" with grim, darkly consoling humor."
- "Time Magazine
"
"Elegant, philosophical and moving...Beautiful and important."
- "Kirkus Reviews," Starred
"This hefty volume is an achievement...a challenging book in both length
and subject..."
- "Publisher's Weekly," Starred
"One of the most highly anticipated young-adult books in years."
- "The Wall Street Journal
"
"Exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable entwinement is a tour de force to be not just read but inhabited."
- "The Horn Book Magazine," Starred
"An extraordinary narrative."
- "School Library Journal," Starred
""Thef

ISBN: 9780375842207
ISBN-10: 0375842209
Series: Readers Circle
Audience: Teenager / Young Adult
For Ages: 12+ years old
For Grades: 7+
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 552
Published: September 2007
Dimensions (cm): 20.066 x 13.208  x 3.302
Weight (kg): 0.408