Zusak BOOK THIEF for teens or adults?
An interesting bit of news from Publishing News’s dispatch on the Bologna Book Fair: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief may be a sensation in Australia and doing well (with a concerted marketing push) here in the US, but has yet to find a British publisher.
Reporter Graham Marks suggests London has seen too many big novels with Holocaust backgrounds recently.
Zusak’s book has been a marketing challenge from the start, in fact. The Australian publisher, Pan Macmillan, promoted it as Literary Fiction for grownups. The Age's reviewer down under called it the “daring debut as an author of adult fiction” of the “prize-winning children's author.”
Random House in the US may be the first press to market The Book Thief primarily for teens. Are young people more used to the Holocaust here? Zusak’s affinity with a certain type of literary teenager is apparent in Random House’s author spotlight page for him.
"Venice Canal," watercolor