Markus Zusak

Markus Zusak is an Australian author whose The Book Thief — narrated by Death during World War II Germany — became a global phenomenon and one of the most beloved works of historical literary fiction.

Markus Zusak is the son of German and Austrian immigrants to Australia, and The Book Thief, published in 2005, drew on stories his parents told him about wartime Germany and post-war Vienna. The novel is narrated by Death, who describes collecting souls during the Nazi era while watching a young German girl, Liesel Meminger, steal books and find humanity in words during a time that seems designed to destroy it. The choice of narrator is audacious and largely succeeds — Death’s perspective allows for both tenderness and terrible foresight.

The Book Thief is not a conventional Holocaust novel. Its focus is a German family hiding a Jewish man in their basement, and the protagonists are a poor, complicated, decent family navigating a world that has gone morally insane. Zusak’s prose is lyrical and aphoristic — arresting at its best, occasionally self-conscious at its worst — and the novel’s emotional climax is devastating in part because Death has prepared the reader for it far in advance. The combination of an unusual narrator, moral complexity, and genuine literary ambition gave the book a crossover appeal between YA and adult literary fiction that few novels achieve.

The criticism most often directed at The Book Thief is that its self-conscious style can feel overwrought — that Death’s narrative voice occasionally tips from poetic into affected. The pacing in the early sections is also slow by YA standards. But for readers who accept the book’s particular register, it delivers an emotional experience that is both painful and deeply affirmative of language, reading, and ordinary human decency.