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The Book Thief

Author: Markus Zusak
Publisher: Black Swan
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

161 reviews
Sales Rank: 9

Media: Paperback
Pages: 560
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1.6

ISBN: 0552773891
EAN: 9780552773898
ASIN: 0552773891

Publication Date: January 1, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New & In Stock - Immediate Despatch!

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 6-10 of 161

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Loved It July 15, 2008
I purchased this book a while ago and probably never would have read it, spurning it for its intimidating weightiness for smaller reads more suited to my lifesytle. However I spent last week in hospital and this book got me through it, I read it quickly, not due to the boredom but due to its help in suspending reality and the authors ability to draw you in. Its not the type of book I would typically read, but it was great, and as much as I wanted to finish it, I now have the difficult task of finding a book to follow it.

5 out of 5 stars

Extremely good July 14, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful

I thought it was extremely good. Very well and cleverly written. Although, it is very sad when the whole street gets bombed in the end and all of liesels friends and family get killed. Oh well, at least max survives and they reunite when the war is over.

2 out of 5 stars

Depressing July 14, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful

This book was highly recommended to me and unfortunately I took it on holiday with me - bad mistake, it is a depressing read and one I would not recommend.

5 out of 5 stars

Stunning.Gripping.Beautiful July 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This is quite simply breathtaking. I was staggered by the scale, the pace and the descriptions.

It's achingly beautiful, moving, gripping and from the first sentence you are hooked. I read that first page and knew I was going to love this.

I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't like this book. I read it at a frenetic pace - completing it this morning and I could pick it up and start reading it again.

YES IT IS THAT GOOD!

5 out of 5 stars

Should I read this book? July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

You have questions, of course... So, should I read this book, "The Book Thief"? Is it any good? Is it yet another depressing book about Nazis and Jews and the Second World War? What is this all about - Death as the narrator - sounds contrived...

I had seen this book, gracing the shelves in bookshops and, to be honest, was attracted by the cover but not sure that I wanted to read another novel about the horrors of the Holocaust. I went with my first instinct - the cover felt right...

This book is not a harrowing hike through the charnel houses of 1940's Europe. It is a simple tale of the trivia which make up human lives. It is moving and rich and captures the simplicity of childhood, the joy of friendship and the love of family in a way both rewarding and entertaining. War is simply the backdrop, the uncontrollable randomness which changes the course of lives with no regard for our individual hopes and desires, for the balance sheet of rights and wrongs, for the things we have yet to do and the things we have left undone...

If you are going to read this book - and I strongly recommend it - do not allow yourself to be derailed by the first 30 pages or so... The book starts with the usually detached narrator introducing himself as the personification of death. In these first few pages, it seems an artifice. In the final analysis, this device allows the narrator to observe the human condition from without, with a slightly confused, bemused air over the antics of humanity. For much of the story - and it is that, a good story - the narrator simply fades back into the pages and fulfils the conventional role.

It takes a good 30 to 50 pages for the story to begin to engage the reader in the very human and skilfully drawn characters that make up its pages. Liesel is a German girl displaced by the churning social re-engineering delivered by Nazism into the hands of a poor, uncouth, but good-hearted foster family - "salt of the earth", you might say. The story which unfolds sometimes smacks of Richmal Crompton's "Just William", but with a mature poignancy pointing to the inherent threat in the new social order. The author litters his text with anthropomorphism and transferred epithet, but with a skill and passion that makes everything come alive, the walls and fabric of the story breathe with emotion and are responsive to the goings on around them.

In the end, this is a beautiful and well-written tale of the magic that fills ordinary lives to make them extraordinary in a way that only those closest to them may ever see. The greatness of great men lives on but the men themselves are truly lost to us as it is the living of a life that gives it its true resonance: it is the minds and memories and hearts which have shared most intently and touched the lives of those souls now lost to us who can truly know and cherish who the dead once were. This book reminds us of that...