The Book Thief

Death itself narrates the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster child sent to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann on Himmel Street in a town outside Munich after her brother dies on the train taking them there and her communist mother disappears from her life. Liesel steals her first book, a gravedigger's manual, at her brother's burial, and Hans, an accordion playing house painter, teaches her to read using it and the books she goes on to steal from bonfires, from a wealthy mayor's private library, and eventually with the help of her best friend, a boy named Rudy Steiner who idolizes the Black American runner Jesse Owens. The Hubermanns hide a Jewish man, Max Vandenburg, in their basement for two years, and Liesel and Max form a close bond built on shared love of words, until Hans's small, dangerous acts of decency, including giving bread to a passing column of concentration camp prisoners, put the family in enough danger that Max leaves to protect them. Liesel survives an Allied bombing raid on Himmel Street only because she is in the basement finishing her own handwritten book at the moment the bombs fall; everyone else on the street, including Hans, Rosa and Rudy, dies. She lives out a long life in Australia, and the novel closes with Death, who has kept her lost manuscript all along, finally returning it to her as he collects her soul decades later.

Zusak balances the accumulating horror of the war against small, stubborn acts of language and loyalty, and having Death himself narrate, weary, almost apologetic about his job, gives otherwise unbearable material an unusual, gentle remove. It reads steadily rather than quickly, aimed at both teenage and adult readers, and its warmth toward ordinary German civilians living under Nazism has occasionally drawn objection from readers expecting a starker moral line.