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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I am a huge reader of GOOD fiction. This is a must read book.
Spectacular story. Wonderfully captivating. I loved it.
This book was brilliant. I couldn’t put it down.
Like many others think, this book was excellent. I will not go into details as others do much more eloquently, but it’s a page turner from the get go. My seasoned heart was pumping big time at times. Could hardly put it down. Congrats to the author for one sensational book!
Suspenseful!!!!! Great World WWII book!
This is my favorite kind of book. I learn a LOT, and it’s not shallow … I can’t “skim” when I read books like this
There are so many things to like about this book – the characters, the challenges, the hopefulness, and the beauty of the writing. Doerr does a remarkable job of conveying to “sighted” people what it is like to be blind.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the timeline. But once I got into it a little more, I enjoyed it. It’s a heartbreaking story of a tragic war.
“The sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else. . . . Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”
~~ Anthony Doerr, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
This enchanting WWII story about Marie-Laure, a blind French girl who survives the Nazi occupation of Paris, and the orphaned German boy named Werner …
The best book I have read in many years.
Not normally written. The storyline is like no other book written before. One of the most enjoyable novel I’ve yet to find, do yourself a favor get it and message me with your thanks :).
This is one of the best books I have ever read. I enjoy novels where there are two different stories that eventually come together in surprising ways. I don’t usually read stories about war, but this book was about so much more. The characters were well-developed and interesting, the writing was beautifully descriptive, and the plot is …
This is a difficult book to describe. It presents a handful of very “small” lives which together paint a deeply disturbing profile of World War II and its legacy. In this way, it brilliantly uses a few people to artfully tell a very big story.
Central in the book are two characters — a motherless blind girl living in occupied France and a German …
One of my all-time faves. Rich and beautiful.
I am having trouble understanding why this book is so highly lauded. After I turned the last page of the novel, I was distinctly underwhelmed. I recall thinking: “Is that all there is”? Although things happened in this book, in the end, nothing really “happened”. I have read other novels in the WW2-era that had much more story, more plot. I was …
Anthony Doerr’s story of the horrors of WWII seen through the experiences of two young children, a blind French girl and a young German boy, reminds the reader of the impact of war and fanaticism on the very young. I was a child myself in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during WWII. When my father was imprisoned in a work-camp in Germany, my mother …
Our bookclub loved!
One of the best books I’ve read- a true gift.
Excellent in audio form. This was not what I expected, but I did like the story and its moral. I think this book illustrates how good people are caught up in the sheer machinery of war, while trying to simply survive. Fear of death led them to join Hitler’s programs even when their hearts revolted. Ity would be a terrible situation to be in, as …
Most beautiful book I’ve read in years. Every word and every sentence is a sheer delight. So tender, so original. A great WW2 novel.