Favorite Author Fridays- Markus Zusak

Well I was gone for most of July and then when I got back the thought of trying to update everything on my blog got so overwhelming I didn't do anything. So here goes...



I read The Book Thief quite a while ago and loved it. It's from the perspective of a young girl living with a German family during World War II. It is amazing. It had tons of surprises and was definately very emotional (which I'm sure you expected form a novel about that era).

Markus tells of why he wrote the book on his webpage:

"When I was growing up, I heard stories at home about Munich and Vienna in war-time, when my parents were children. Two stories my mother told me affected me a lot. The first was about Munich being bombed, and how the sky was on fire, how everything was red. The second was about something else she saw...

One day, there was a terrible noise coming from the main street of town, and when she ran to see it, she saw that Jewish people were being marched to Dachau, the concentration camp. At the back of the line, there was an old man, totally emaciated, who couldn't keep up. When a teenage boy saw this, he ran inside and brought the man a piece of bread. The man fell to his knees and kissed the boy's ankles and thanked him...Soon, a soldier noticed and walked over. He tore the bread from the man's hands and whipped him for taking it. Then he chased the boy and whipped him for giving him the bread in the first place. In one moment, there was great kindness and great cruelty, and I saw it as the perfect story of how humans are."

That's how the whole book is- filled with 'great kindness and great cruelty'.

Had this been his only book I would have blogged about him earlier but he's written other books and I felt I needed to read at least one more before I could recommend him as an author, not just recommend his book. So over vacation I read his book, The Messenger. It too was beautiful and touching and, in places, very hard to read. I cried with joy and sorrow while reading it and was convinced Markus Zusak wasn't just a one-hit wonder.

I have had some problems finding copies of his other books so I'll probably just have to buy them off amazon or ebay but I can't imagine that I won't love them.

Here's his Bibliography:

The Underdog (1999)
When Dogs Cry- published as Getting the Girl in the US (2001)
The Messenger- published as I Am the Messenger in the US (2002)
Fighting Ruben Wolfe (2001)
The Book Thief (2006)