The Book Thief

by Mark Zusak (Audiobook)

Death, the voice of Allan Corduner, tells a story set in World War II, Nazi Germany. A nine-year-old girl, Liesel Meminger, is taken to live with a family on 31 Himmel Street. Death is fascinated by this wild, imaginative, and lively girl and the journey of her youth during such a tumultuous time. She comes to love her gruff and foul-mouthed foster mother, Rosa, and her accordion-playing foster father, Hans, who teaches her how to roll cigarettes, how to read and how to write. Despite economic hardship and air raids, Leisel spends her life happily among her friends: Rudy, the yellow-haired thieving accomplice, Max, the hide-away Jew in their basement, and even the mayor's wife, who turns a blind eye to her stealing. It is a story of love and loss, of a child's realization of the cruelty and beauty of the world around her. Her story is punctuated by the stories she steals, until finally she writes her own. Emotional, heartwrenching, and beautiful.