Winner of the Pulitzer Prize A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book* A National Book Award finalist * From Anthony Doerr, the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning author of Cloud Cuckoo Land, 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 … France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. 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, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. 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).
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One of the best written books I have ever read
This is one of those novels that makes an author’s breath catch when she realizes just how stunning every single word is, just how impossible it is to capture this kind of literary magic for herself. So it’s magnificent. Yes, it’s long and perhaps somewhere in the middle a reader might wonder if the book is slowing too much… but no, it isn’t. …
A marvelous book by one of my favorite authors.
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE won the Pulitzer Prize, was a National Book Award Finalist and was on the NY Times Best Seller list for three years. It’s been reviewed over 65,000 times on Goodreads. I doubt I can add anything that hasn’t already been discussed in detail by much better reviewers than me. But I’m trying to review everything I read (it …
I enjoyed this book, very much. The author used many techniques that gave so much depth and meaning to his story that surpassed that of many other authors. I felt as if I was there with each character as the story progressed. I highly recommend this book.
All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. 1930’s, Marie-Laure and her father live in Paris. He is the keeper of the keys at the national museum of natural history. She goes blind at the age of 6 from congenital cataracts, her father built a miniature model of their neighborhood for her to learn how to get around. Also taught her Braille and …
This book is on my list of BEST books I ever read.
It was at times difficult to read but gave a perspective of the effects of World War II from a different view-the view of the children affected.
I found it to be a very powerful and compelling read.
Wonderful WWII era book. Great characters and excellent writing.
One of the best books I’ve read.
Beautifully and poetically written, this novel goes back and forth in time as well as back and forth between a blind French teenage girl and a teenage German soldier during WWII. The Germans are preoccupied with a rare diamond that the girl’s father is believed to have. The young boy is preoccupied with radios,transceivers, and transmitters, and …
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is 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 that I listened to on audio narrated by Zach Appelman.
This was my book clubs pick for the month so it was outside my usual genre and I had hard time focusing on …
One of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It has a different slant on on how the German people were affected by the Nazis.
Lyrical..So beautifully descriptive, I was there… I stood at the window smelling the ink of the leaflets, I felt the hardness and wonderful texture’s of the snails clinging to the dark wet walls, I felt the terror building as I sat in the dark, waiting and listening, for the sound of the trapdoor sliding slowly open…I felt the prescious, …
A ‘once or twice a decade’s book.
Well written insightful story during a war that looks at people brought together from different backgrounds and thought processes which through kindness and sacrifice change in amazing ways.
Beautiful book.
a book i can reread more than once.
Excellent!
Such a phony piece of silliness! don’t know how it came to be so revered.
One of my all time favorites. I have read and re read this book. You feel like you are there with all the amazing well-developed characters. An amazing well layered book.
This is the best book that I have read in the last few years–highly recommended.
The story of a German soldier and a blind French girl against the backdrop of WWII.