Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is perhaps the biggest Australian bestseller of all time (at 8 million copies, it’s certainly the most-sold Australian book this century).
Zusak published his first novel, The Underdog, in 1999 when he was 24, which received little fanfare. He wrote two more books for that series about inner-city Sydney. Then he wrote The Messenger, which could be his second best-loved book, in 2002.
He then wrote The Book Thief. Released in 2005, the story of Nazi Germany included death personified as a character. The book became an international bestseller, and was adapted into a feature film starring Geoffrey Rush in 2013.
Markus Zusak hit a wall after writing five books in six years. He was floored by his success, he revealed in a Good Weekend profile, and endured almost a decade of crippling writer’s block.
‘It was awful,’ he said. ‘Nothing I did was working. I was just failing and failing, over and over again.’
Thirteen years after the release of The Book Thief, today Zusak releases Bridge of Clay, a novel touted by Pan Macmillan as ‘the most anticipated book of the decade’.
Zusak says he wrote, scrapped, and re-wrote the first page of his new book thousands of times.
The novel follows the Dunbar boys, five brothers whose mother has died and father has fled. It centres on Clay, whose the second-youngest of five, as he helps to build a bridge in the bush.
Zusak told The Guardian in 2016: ‘I’m writing a book called Bridge of Clay – about a boy building a bridge and wanting it to be perfect. He wants to achieve greatness with this bridge, and the question is whether it will survive when the river floods.’
