Key themes
- Death as a witness to human capacity for beauty and cruelty
- Language and story as survival
- Ordinary life under totalitarianism
About this book
A girl in Nazi Germany who steals books, narrated by Death itself; original, tender and devastating.
Published in 2005, The Book Thief was originally marketed as a young adult novel but found an equally large adult readership. Its narrator and structure were unprecedented in popular fiction about the Holocaust.
Discussion questions
- The narrator is Death. What does this choice allow Zusak to do — what perspective does Death have that a human narrator could not?
- Liesel steals books as acts of resistance and comfort. What is the novel saying about the relationship between literacy, humanity and the ability to survive?
- The novel is set in a working-class German town among people who are neither perpetrators nor resisters but simply trying to survive. How does this setting complicate the usual moral framework of World War Two fiction?
- Max's illustrated books within the novel — stories he creates for Liesel — are among the most moving passages. What do these inner texts add to the novel's meditation on storytelling?
- Death tells us from early on how the story ends. How does this structural choice affect your reading — does knowing the ending change your experience of arriving there?
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