The Book Thief

Liesel Meminger is a young girl living with a foster family on Himmel Street in Nazi Germany. She steals books. Death narrates. Zusak — Australian, the son of German and Austrian immigrants — writes from inside the experience of ordinary Germans living under the Third Reich: not the perpetrators, not the resisters, but the people on a street trying to survive something they didn't fully choose and can't fully escape. A Jewish man hides in the basement. Hans Hubermann plays the accordion. Words become the only thing that holds against the darkness. The most widely read YA novel about WWII and the one that most honestly shows what it cost ordinary people to be good inside a system designed to make goodness dangerous.