Markus Zusak is the international bestselling author of six novels,
including The Book Thief and most recently, Bridge
of Clay. His work is translated into more than forty
languages, and has spent more than a decade on the New York
Times bestseller list, establishing Zusak as one of the most
successful authors to come out of Australia.
All of Zusak’s books – including earlier titles, The
Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, When Dogs Cry (also
titled Getting the Girl), and The
Messenger (or I am the Messenger) – have been
awarded numerous honors around the world, ranging from literary
prizes to readers choice awards to prizes voted on by
booksellers.
In 2013, The Book Thief was made into a major motion
picture, and in 2018 was voted one of America’s all-time favorite
books, achieving the 14th position on the PBS Great American
Read. Also in 2018, Bridge of Clay was selected as a best
book of the year in publications ranging from Entertainment
Weekly to the Wall Street Journal.
Markus Zusak grew up in Sydney, Australia, and still lives there
with his wife and two children.
“Brilliant and hugely ambitious…Some will argue that a book so
difficult and sad may not be appropriate for teenage readers…Adults
will probably like it (this one did), but it’s a great young-adult
novel…It’s the kind of book that can be life-changing, because
without ever denying the essential amorality and randomness of the
natural order, The Book Thief offers us a believable
hard-won hope…The hope we see in Liesel is unassailable, the kind
you can hang on to in the midst of poverty and war and violence.
Young readers need such alternatives to ideological rigidity, and
such explorations of how stories matter. And so, come to think of
it, do adults.” -New York Times
"The Book Thief is unsettling and unsentimental, yet
ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the
reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of
life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but The
Book Thief deserves a place on the same shelf with The
Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Elie
Wiesel's Night. It seems poised to become a
classic." -USA Today
"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 Magazine
"Elegant, philosophical and moving...Beautiful and
important." -Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"This hefty volume is an achievement...a challenging book in both
length and subject..." -Publisher's Weekly,
Starred
"One of the most highly anticipated young-adult books in years."
-The Wall Street Journal
"Exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant
tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable
entwinement is a tour de force to be not just read but
inhabited." -The Horn Book Magazine, Starred
"An extraordinary narrative." -SLJ, Starred
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