An extraordinary work of imagination for readers 12 to adult—a Michael L. Printz Honor Book and a winner of the Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Children's Literature and the National Jewish Book Award—this is the story of a girl named Liesel living with a poor foster family in Nazi Germany. At her brother's graveside she finds and takes a book lying in the snow, and this simple theft leads to a passion for books that carries her through the years of struggle ahead. Markus Zusak writes with a simplicity of language but an acuteness of observation and intuition, at once innocent and profound, which is appropriate, as his narrator is Death himself, an amiable if otherworldly being who is haunted by the humans he watches so closely. This edition includes a reader's guide.
"Brilliant and hugely ambitious ... it's the kind of book that can be life changing."—NYTimes
"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
