The Book Thief

#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 • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST YOUNG ADULT BOOK OF THE 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 Today

DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF.

BUY THE BOOK

608 pages

Average rating: 8.59

1,079 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

Anonymous
Apr 19, 2025
10/10 stars
Most excellent book!!!!
@MissLitLife
Mar 31, 2025
8/10 stars
What a brilliant and creatively written and curated story...you will laugh, you will cry, you will cheer and you will be heartbroken but you will feel immensely grateful that you spent your reading time with these characters and this story... For me, this story is a collection of the joyful and hopeful moments that could be experienced/collected during WWII, as well as the daily hardships, snippets of despair, outbursts of anguish, fear, and tragedy felt by a small/rural German community as well as the characters' displays of triumphs, defiance, resilience, kindness and bravery that are both admirable and bewildering to the book's narrator - death The story's central characters - Liesel, Rudy, Rosa and Hans Hubberman and Max are now beloved to me and will be added to the kindle that warms my bookish heart... The scene of a German boy handing a fallen Allied soldier a teddy bear as he takes his last breaths beautifully is hauntingly etched in my mind and summarizes what makes this book so powerful... holding onto our humanity in some of history's darkest hours...
Anonymous
Mar 27, 2025
8/10 stars
It was a beautiful read. I enjoyed it.
Anonymous
Jan 11, 2025
4/10 stars
i couldn’t tell what this book was trying to do. there are other books out there that better tell the tragedies of the holocaust, and i don’t think a white blonde german girl’s point of view is going to be the best way to get that story.
maybe it was supposed to be about the dimensions of people who can have good and bad in them? but the characters weren’t that strongly written…

i could continue but my phone doesn’t have much battery right now. basically i thought the writing of this book was nice in certain parts but it was not worth the length of this book
Anitathapaj
Jan 10, 2025
Love it

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