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Chapters
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Chapters
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The Book Thief has 12 chapters.
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Chapters12 items
Prologue: Death and Chocolate
Death introduces itself as the narrator and describes its job of collecting human souls. It explains how it tries to notice the colors of the sky to distract itself from the human…
Part One: The Grave Digger's Handbook
Liesel Meminger, age nine, is traveling by train with her mother and younger brother Werner. Werner dies on the journey.
Part Two: The Shoulder Shrug
Liesel is now more settled in Molching and has made a friend in Rudy Steiner, the boy next door. She attends school, where her inability to read initially humiliates her, but her…
Part Three: Mein Kampf
Hans Hubermann agrees to hide a Jewish man named Max Vandenburg in the family's basement. Max is the son of a man who saved Hans's life in World War One, and Hans feels bound by t…
Part Four: The Standover Man
Max creates a handmade book for Liesel using painted-over pages of Mein Kampf. The book, called The Standover Man, tells Max's own story in words and images, ending with Liesel as…
Part Five: The Whistler
Liesel steals a new book from a pile being sold by the mayor's wife, Ilsa Hermann, who seems to allow it. Meanwhile, Max Vandenburg, hiding in the Hubermanns' basement, grows sick…
Part Six: The Dream Carrier
Max begins writing and illustrating a second book for Liesel, this one built directly from their shared experiences. Rudy continues to push Liesel closer, and the two steal more b…
Part Seven: The Complete Duden Dictionary and Thesaurus
The bombing raids on Molching intensify, and the neighborhood begins spending nights in shelters. Liesel brings her book to read aloud to calm the frightened people around her.
Part Eight: The Word Shaker
Max's second book for Liesel is presented in full. It tells a fable about a girl who grows a tree from a single word and uses it to resist a man who controls the world through lan…
Part Nine: The Last Human Stranger
Hans is conscripted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front as punishment for giving bread to a Jewish prisoner on a march.
Part Ten: The Book Thief
The war reaches its worst point for Himmel Street. The bombing that Death has been hinting at since early in the novel finally happens, killing Rudy, Hans, Rosa, and nearly everyo…
Epilogue: The Last Color
Death delivers a brief closing account of what happened to Liesel after Himmel Street. She moved to Australia, had a family, and lived a long life.
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