The Book Thief (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2007), a novel by Australian writer Markus Zusak, accomplished a rare feat for Holocaust literature: the novel won numerous literary awards and became a long-standing international best seller, including being on the New York Times best seller list for a record of 230 weeks. What&#8217;s even more surprising about the novel&#8217;s success is not only its somber theme, but also the fact it&#8217;s a work of literary fiction (as opposed to genre fiction), a style of writing that rarely becomes a mainstream hit. Although the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is not cut-and-dry&#8212;for instance, Elizabeth Kostova&#8217;s novel, The Historian, fits both genres--I&#8217;d say that genre fiction places emphasis upon a fast-moving, interesting plot, while literary fiction privileges psychologically nuanced characterizations and a unique narrative style.Death characterized the Holocaust, and Death is the real narrator of the novel, which begins with the heroine&#8217;s end: Liesel Meminger&#8217;s death, many years after WWII, after she&#8217;s lived a full life and had children and grandchildren of her own. As Death carries the elderly woman&#8217;s soul to the other side, it also takes and narrates her childhood diary.In the late 1930&#8217;s and early 40&#8217;s, Liesel is a young adopted girl living in Germany. She has her first encounter with Death when her brother, Werner Meminger, who is also given up for adoption along with her, dies on the train to Molching. He&#8217;s buried by the railway station. That day, Liesel&#8217;s obsession with books&#8212;and death--begins. She picks up The Grave Digger&#8217;s Handbook, a book dropped by the funeral director at her brother&#8217;s funeral.Shortly thereafter, the distraught girl joins what might be seen as a typical German family, with whom she bonds quickly. Liesel&#8217;s adoptive father, Hans Hubermann, is a loyal German, who served during WWI, but is not sympathetic to the Nazi regime. Despite his reservations, Hans is enlisted in the German army during WWII. Artistic and sensitive&#8212;a painter and accordion player--Hans probably characterizes the attitude of a vast majority of Germans who were not anti-Semitic yet were forced to participate in the Nazi regime. His wife, Rosa, is a no-nonsense woman with a sharp tongue and a loving heart. She washes people&#8217;s clothes to supplement their income but gradually, one by one, her customers fire her.Liesel also meets Max Vandenburg, a Jew hidden by the Hubermann family from the Nazis, whose father fought during WWI alongside Hans Hubermann. Liesel befriends him. When Hans becomes ill, she reads to him. He eventually recovers, in part, the novel suggests, because of the power of friendship transmitted through the act of reading. Liesel and her family have a close call with the Gestapo, as soldiers search their house to see if they can use their basement as a shelter. Fortunately, they deem it too shallow and they leave.In all respects, Liesel blends in with her adoptive family. Their hardships and struggles become hers as well. She becomes especially close friends with Rudy Steiner, a blond &#8220;Aryan&#8221; boy a few months older than her, who develops a crush on her. Although the girl refuses to kiss him, together they embark on many adventures, which bond them to one another. Together, they become book thieves when the Mayor and his wife also fire Rosa. Their love of books and of the forbidden, representing a kind of protest against the Nazi regime and against injustice in life in general, binds the two children even more.Perhaps the strongest character of the novel is Death itself, its main narrator. Death may be brought about by war and by the savage murders perpetrated by the Nazis, but it is not sympathetic to them. Rather, Zusak depicts Death as a kind of Humanist, philosophical character: humane and disapproving of senseless violence, hatred and destruction. In parts, Death touches upon the comic and the absurd, needing &#8220;a vacation&#8221; from its job during the war.I think the strength of this novel lies in its complex characterizations: the German characters in particular are nuanced and multifaceted, not stereotyped in any way. They too struggle with the evils perpetrated by the Nazi regime and try to help victims, as much as they can. In the end, however, they too become victims of Hitler&#8217;s war, as Rosa, Hans and Rudy all die when the Hubermann house is bombed. Rudy doesn&#8217;t even get to experience Liesel&#8217;s first kiss, dying seconds before she finally declares her love for him and kisses him. Only Liesel survives and gets the chance to have a full life.If I were to identify any weakness in the novel it would be in the narrative style. Since style functions as a kind of author&#8217;s unique fingerprint in literary fiction, it&#8217;s largely dependent upon each reader&#8217;s subjective taste. The choppy, short sentences and disjointed, subjective structure of the novel weren&#8217;t to my personal taste, particularly since I usually look for a dense, sweeping and well-informed description of lived history in Holocaust literature. This novel, however, is impressionistic in both style and structure. But these stylistic features also made The Book Thief popular with readers of all ages, particularly with young readers, who could identify with the characters and appreciate its accessible form. Due to its literary success, The Book Thief was recently made into a movie directed by Brian Percival, released in November 2013. The movie, however, unlike the book, received mixed reviews.Claudia Moscovici, Literature Salon 

Question: How is the book?
Answer: the novel won numerous literary awards and became a long standing international best seller