Rating: *****
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Literary, Lang:en
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Added: May 15, 2018
Modified: November 5, 2021
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).