All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure LeBlanc lives with her father in Paris, near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she goes blind at the age of six, he builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and find her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo on the coast of Brittany, carrying with them what may be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner Pfennig grows up with his younger sister, fascinated by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth and then a special assignment tracking the resistance. As the war progresses, his path draws closer to Marie-Laure’s, until the two finally meet in Saint-Malo during the devastating siege of 1944.

Told in short, luminous chapters that move between characters and across time, All the Light We Cannot See explores the ways in which people, against all odds, try to be good to one another.

Anthony Doerr’s novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a global bestseller, later adapted into a Netflix limited series.

Beautifully written and deeply moving, it is an unforgettable read for lovers of historical and literary fiction.