Markus Zusak pitches the reader into a ‘terrifically teenaged world’. The distinction is not immediately apparent, as Zusak pitches the reader into the “terrifically teenaged world” of the Dunbar boys five fractious, semi-feral brothers living unsupervised in a suburb of Sydney against a backdrop of cheap food, bad movies and badly behaved pets. At almost 600 pages it shares The Book Thief’s epic weight, but is the first of his novels to be promoted as general fiction, rather than for young adults. Yet the most arresting aspect of the novel was the first-person perspective of the Grim Reaper, who turned out not to be particularly grim at all, but rather sardonic, personable and remarkably funny.ĭeath was always going to be a difficult act to follow and Zusak has laboured for more than a decade on his subsequent work. Markus Zusak’s 2005 The Book Thief, the story of a young German girl whose family give shelter to a Jewish refugee during the second world war, became an international bestseller. I t takes courage, not to mention a macabre twist of the imagination, to conceive a novel for young adults narrated by Death.
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