Quotes from book

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Much like the process he undertakes when writing most of his novels, Boyne has said that he wrote the entire first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in two and a half days, without sleeping much. He has faced criticism from holocaust literature scholars such as Trevor Agnew, a freelance writer based in New Zealand, for using general knowledge on the holocaust rather than historical fact. Boyne defends, however, that he was quite a serious student of the Holocaust for years before the idea for the novel even came to him. The book has received mixed criticism, with positive reviews praising Boyne's novel as a moral tale and a fable, while negative reviews attack the book's historical inaccuracies and the damages that it may produce in educating about the Holocaust. As of December 5, 2016, the novel had sold more than seven million copies around the world. In both 2007 and 2008, it was the best selling book of the year in Spain, and it also reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was adapted in 2008 as a film of the same name as well as a ballet in 2017.