Arts & Letters
Which novel narrated by Death is set in Nazi Germany?
- The Book Thief
- All the Light We Cannot See
- Schindler's Ark
The answer is The Book Thief. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, published in 2005 - the story of a foster child in a small German town who steals books, told by Death, who is tired, overworked in this particular period, and haunted by humans rather than the other way round.
The narrator is the structural gamble. Death gives away the endings early, announcing who will die and roughly when, which removes suspense deliberately so the book has to work on something else. It also solves a problem of perspective: an ordinary German family sheltering a Jewish man in the basement is difficult to narrate without either excusing or condemning, and a narrator with no stake in any nation can simply report.
Zusak wrote it from his parents' accounts of childhood in Austria and Germany, including his mother watching people marched to Dachau and a man being whipped for giving one of them bread. It was published as adult fiction in Australia and as young adult in the United States, which is a marketing decision rather than a literary one, and it has spent the better part of two decades on bestseller lists in both categories.