This was an amazing book. Not only were the characters just so real but the writing itself was a dream to read. The wording was so clever that I envied many of the sentences, especially those dealing the Death, the narrator. Be prepared to become emotionally attached to characters and then have them ripped away. By far, one of my favorite WWII novels. The only criticism would be that it is a bit long and I wanted it to end a hundred or so pages before it actually did.