Summary: The Book Thief

The GIST

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is a historical novel set in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and it is told by the last narrator you would expect: Death. He has a great deal of work to do in these years, and yet one small life keeps catching his attention, a girl named Liesel Meminger, who arrives in a new town with nothing and begins, one book at a time, to steal her way into the world of words.

Zusak, an Australian author, published the novel in 2005, and it became an international phenomenon: translated into 63 languages, more than 17 million copies sold, a feature film in 2013 and later a stage musical. It matters because it does something rare with a period we think we already know. It shows the war from inside an ordinary, poor German household, among people who are neither heroes nor monsters, and it asks what words can do in a country where words are being used to poison a nation. Its great themes are death, literature and love, and it treats all three with a tenderness that has made readers of every age hold it close.

The Story

The voice that opens the book belongs to Death, the collector of souls. He is not the hooded figure of nightmares. He is tired, observant and oddly gentle, and he insists to the reader that he "most definitely can be cheerful," even while admitting that nice is something he cannot be. He meets everyone eventually, he explains, but now and then a human story compels him to linger. Liesel's is one of those.

We meet her on the worst day of her young life. Her father has already been taken away by the Nazis for being a Communist. Her mother, Paula, unable to protect her children, is taking Liesel and her little brother Werner by train to be handed over to foster parents. On the journey Werner dies suddenly. He is buried in a cemetery near the railway tracks, and there, in the snow, Liesel spots a small book dropped by a boy who is learning the gravediggers' trade. It is a manual for digging graves. She cannot read a word of it. She takes it anyway, and it becomes the one thing she owns that ties her to her brother and her mother. It is the first theft of the book thief.

Liesel is delivered to the town of Molching and to her new parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Rosa, whom she must learn to call Mama, is five feet tall, built like a wardrobe, with her brown-grey hair pulled into a tight bun and a face set in permanent displeasure. She has a ferocious tongue and uses it on everyone. She takes in washing and ironing from the wealthier homes of Molching to keep the household fed. Under the temper, though, she is a loving wife and, as Liesel slowly discovers, a loving mother.

Hans, her Papa, is the quiet centre of the story. He fought as a German soldier in the First World War. Now he paints houses and plays the accordion. He is the one who sits with Liesel, who becomes her source of strength, and who decides to teach her to read, though he is not much of a reader himself. So the two of them learn together, with the gravedigger's manual as their unlikely first text, and they paint every new word they master onto a wall in the basement. For a girl who arrived grieving and unable to read, that wall is a record of a life being rebuilt.

Outside the house she finds her other great ally, the boy next door. Rudy Steiner has bony legs, blue eyes and hair the colour of lemons. He is one of six children in a poor family and is always hungry. He is also famous in the neighbourhood for what everyone calls the Jesse Owens incident: one night he covered himself in charcoal and ran a hundred metres at the local sports field in honour of the Black American sprinter. Rudy looks exactly like the regime's ideal German child, and he is gifted both in the classroom and on the track, which soon draws the attention of Nazi Party officials who want to recruit him. But he has no love for the Nazis, and that becomes a problem. He becomes Liesel's best friend and her partner in mischief, and in time he falls in love with her.

Liesel's hunger for words grows as she does. Having stolen one book from a graveside, she steals another from the embers of a Nazi book burning, pulling it out of a bonfire meant to destroy it. Then, while collecting and delivering laundry for Rosa, she comes to know Ilsa Hermann, the wife of Molching's mayor. Ilsa has lived in a fog of grief since her only son, Johann, died in the Great War. She also has a library, a whole room full of books, and she lets the girl in to read. Liesel keeps coming back to that library, sometimes invited and sometimes not, and sometimes with Rudy keeping watch.

All the while, the politics of the country press in. The Hubermanns' own son, Hans Jr., is a fervent supporter of the Nazi Party and quarrels bitterly with his father over it. And then the war comes into the house itself. A young Jewish man named Max Vandenburg, a fist-fighter, turns up seeking refuge. His father fought beside Hans in the First World War and saved Hans's life, and Hans has not forgotten the debt. At enormous risk, the Hubermanns hide Max in their basement, the same basement where Liesel's words are painted on the wall.

There, a wary girl and a hunted man discover that they love the same thing. Liesel and Max trade stories in the cold and dark. He writes two books for her, and gives her a sketchbook containing the story of his own life. In a country that has declared him less than human, he becomes one of the people who teaches her most about what being human means, and he helps turn a reader into a writer.

But a secret like this is fragile. A single act by Hans draws suspicion onto the household, the suspicion that he sympathises with the enemies of the state, and suddenly the basement no longer feels safe for anyone. Meanwhile Ilsa Hermann gives Liesel a gift of blank pages, and the book thief begins to write a story of her own. What becomes of the people on her street, with Death watching and the war closing in, is for the reader to find out.

What It's Really About

The first great theme is mortality. A story narrated by Death in the middle of a war and a genocide could easily be unbearable, yet Zusak makes his narrator a figure of care rather than terror. Death explains himself. He tells us how he feels about the lives he must take, and he is sometimes moved to act out of sympathy for the humans he watches. At one point he says that "even death has a heart." Because the worst is never hidden from us, the small joys, a word learned, an accordion played, a race run in the dark, shine all the brighter.

The second theme, and the one that gives the novel its title, is the power of words. Reading and writing are shown as forms of freedom and identity. Liesel's whole coming of age is measured in literacy: she begins with a book she cannot read and grows, as her body and mind grow, into someone who can write her own. Words also mark class. The wealthy of Molching own books and even libraries, while the poor own none, and Rosa's rough, colourful way of speaking belongs to the hard lives of people with little. Against all this stands the regime, which burns books. In the novel that burning stands for evil itself, so when Liesel rescues a book from the fire she is doing far more than stealing. She is taking her freedom back from a state that wants to control every thought.

The third theme is love, which works in this story as the force that changes people and makes them brave. Liesel arrives traumatised by the loss of her brother, her separation from her mother and the cruelty of the world around her, and she heals by learning to love and be loved, first by Hans, then by Rosa, Rudy and Max. The Hubermanns' decision to shelter Max is an act of defiance against a government that claims the right to decide who counts as a person. And the friendship between a German girl and a Jewish man, built on shared words in a basement, stands in the starkest possible contrast to the hatred raging above them.

Readers love the book for the way these three themes braid together: love, language and identity all become ways of keeping hold of oneself amid chaos and control. They love it, too, for its people, the gentle painter with his accordion, the foster mother whose insults hide her heart, the boy with lemon hair. The honours followed, among them the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book for its region, the National Jewish Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature, a Michael L. Printz Honor and the Sydney Taylor Book Award. The 2013 film starred Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as Hans and Rosa and Sophie Nélisse as Liesel, with music by John Williams, and a musical version, with a libretto co-written by Jodi Picoult, opened in England in 2022.

Who Should Read It

This is a book for anyone who believes that stories matter, and for anyone who needs reminding. Lovers of historical fiction will find a view of wartime Germany from an unusual angle, teenagers and adults alike will find characters they will not forget, and readers who enjoy an original voice will be won over by a narrator who is, of all things, Death with a heart. It is sad, as any honest book about this time must be, but it is also funny, warm and full of love, and it will leave you thinking about the weight and worth of words.

This has been a summary of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.