With the release this month of the Geoffrey Rush movie of ‘The Book Thief’ I thought I should remind you all that this book should be on your list of ‘must reads.’ Released in 2005, this is a wonderful story set during World War Two.
In 1939 Nazi Germany, death has never been busier. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Their father has been taken away and her brother perishes. At his graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she picks up a single object hidden in the snow. It is ‘The Gravedigger’s Handbook,’ left there by accident and her first act of book thievery. This begins her love affair with books as she learns to read with the help of her foster father. She begins to steal books from Nazi book burnings, the Mayor’s wife’s library and wherever else she can find them. The story is a wonderfully evocative depiction
of life for young people at the time of the Second World War.
The ‘Book Thief’ is about the power of love and of words to make worlds, and while exposing Jewish atrocities also exposes incidents when books saved life and sanity. A story of survival in the most brutal of times by the power of words in a young Jewish girl’s life.
You’ll not forget this book.