Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Literary, Lang:en
Summary
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE From the highly acclaimed,
multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly
ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind
French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied
France as both try to survive the devastation of World War
II.Marie-Laure 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 is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and
her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so
she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When
she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter
flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where
Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house
by the sea. With them they carry what might be the
museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining
town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger
sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an
expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a
talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler
Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More
and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner
travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into
Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and
gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are
dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and
Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try
to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National
Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a
magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose
sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).