#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME • A NEW YORK TIMES READER TOP 100 PICK FOR BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times.When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of
I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.
“The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —
The New York Times “Deserves a place on the same shelf with
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —
USA TodayDON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF.
On sale: October 15, 2013
Age: 12 and up
Grade: Grade 7 & Up
Page count: 592 Pages
ISBN: 9780385754729
Reading level: Lexile: 730L | Fountas/Pinnell: Z+
Markus Zusak is the international bestselling author of six novels, including
The Book Thief and most recently,
Bridge of Clay. His work is translated into more than forty languages, and has spent more than a decade on the
New York Times bestseller list, establishing Zusak as one of the most successful authors to come out of Australia.
All of Zusak’s books – including earlier titles,
The Underdog,
Fighting Ruben Wolfe,
When Dogs Cry (also titled
Getting the Girl), and
The Messenger (or
I am the Messenger) – have been awarded numerous honors around the world, ranging from literary prizes to readers choice awards to prizes voted on by booksellers.
In 2013,
The Book Thief was made into a major motion picture, and in 2018 was voted one of America’s all-time favorite books, achieving the 14th position on the
PBS Great American Read. Also in 2018,
Bridge of Clay was selected as a best book of the year in publications ranging from
Entertainment Weekly to the
Wall Street Journal.
Markus Zusak grew up in Sydney, Australia, and still lives there with his wife and two children.
“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"
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." -
SLJ, Starred
