All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See is Anthony Doerr's most ambitious and evocative book yet.

Set during World War II, Doerr expertly interweaves the lives of a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and an orphaned German boy, Werner, whose paths collide as they try to survive the physical and emotional annihilation of the war. Built on an intricate, labyrinthine structure, the novel presents the gradually intersecting stories of all those within it, the relationships which hold them together and the journeys they undertake. From a flat in Paris to the confines of a house in Northern France, Marie-Laure finds solace in her agoraphobic uncle’s attic, an old shortwave radio and her father’s handcrafted scale model villages. Werner, meanwhile, travels through the radioactive heart of the Hitler Youth to the far flung outskirts of Russia, and finally onto France, comforted by recollections from his childhood and letters to his younger sister, Jutta.

This stunning novel is about radio, puzzles, seashells, the Breton city of Saint-Malo, a fabled diamond, and the ways, against all odds, we try to be good to one another.