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by: John Boyne
List Price: $14.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.21 You Save: $3.74 (25%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780312378042
ISBN: 0312378041
Label: St. Martin's Griffin
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Release Date: January 22, 2008
Sales Rank: 580250
Studio: St. Martin's Griffin
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
John Boyne has become internationally known for his acclaimed novels Crippen and the bestselling The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Now, for the first time in the United States, comes the book that started the career of the author that the Irish Examiner calls “one of the best and original of the new generation of Irish writers.'
It is 1758 and Matthieu Zela is fleeing Paris after witnessing the murder of his mother and his stepfather's execution. Matthieu's life is characterized by one extraordinary fact: before the eighteenth century ends, he discovers that his body has stopped ageing. At the end of the twentieth century and the ripe old age of 256 he is suddenly forced to answer an uncomfortable question: what is the worth of immortality without love?
In this carefully crafted novel, John Boyne juxtaposes history and the buzz of the modern world, weaving together portraits of 1920s Hollywood, the Great Exhibition of 1851, the French Revolution, the Wall Street Crash, and other landmark events into one man's story of murder, love, and redemption.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The Thief of Time by John Boyne
This is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it. John Boyne's style of writing transports the reader immediately into the world of Matthieu Zela. Finishing the book is like coming back from a wonderful vacation..one you would definitely take again.
Rating:  - Not exactly the historical saga you'd expect
I had loved the boy in the striped pajamas, however I am somewhat disappointed by this Boyne novel.
As entertaining as it might be to some, it gave me a very quick and shallow sum-up of the history of Europe in the last three hundred years more than follow a clear storyline. Some chapters were totally irrelevant to the main plot and the two phases of his life, its beginning and end, on which the author puts most weight, were quiet honestly, boring.
I had bought it along "Mutiny on Bounty" ... Read More
Rating: - An entertaining foray through the years, told with style and wit
Frenchman Matthieu Zéla may be the only 256-year-old television executive in London. He has been gifted with extraordinary long life minus the nuisance of actually aging, but this supposed blessing comes with a price: Matthieu must bear witness to the destruction of a long line of nephews and grand-nephews, who all die young and violent deaths and are named some variation of Thomas.
THE THIEF OF TIME by John Boyne (author of the recent bestseller THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS and the acclaimed ... Read More
Rating: - fascinating historical fantasy
In 1999, Matthieu Zela turned two hundred and fifty six years old though anyone seeing him would guess he is in his late forties. Matthieu has never understood why he simply stopped aging back in the late eighteenth century, but he has outlived nine generations of descendents of his late younger half-brother Tomas. That is not saying much since they all died in their twenties after siring a male offspring due to either insanity or events out of their control.
Currently he resides in London where ... Read More
Rating: - Unique Points of View
"And I am not one of these long-living fictional characters who prays for death as a release from the captivity of eternal life; not for me the endless whining and wailing of the undead."
With these words, written on the first few pages of his novel "The Thief of Time," John Boyne pretty much sold me on the central idea of the book: a man who is over 250 years old but looks like a man in his late 40's or early 50's, and who has looked essentially the same for about 200 years.
Matthieu ... Read More
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