All the Light We Cannot See

a book

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 2014 · 531 pages

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book 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, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

recommended by 11 people

sourced from public statements

books like All the Light We Cannot See

other books recommended by the same people who recommend this one

  1. A Gentleman in Moscow

    A Gentleman in Moscow

    Amor Towles

    4 shared recommenders

  2. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

    Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

    Matthew Desmond

    2 shared recommenders

  3. Exit West: A Novel

    Exit West: A Novel

    Mohsin Hamid

    2 shared recommenders

  4. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

    Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

    Hans Rosling

    2 shared recommenders

  5. Heartland

    Heartland

    Sarah Smarsh

    2 shared recommenders

  6. Lab Girl

    Lab Girl

    Hope Jahren

    2 shared recommenders

  7. The Girl on the Train

    The Girl on the Train

    Paula Hawkins

    2 shared recommenders

  8. The Underground Railroad

    The Underground Railroad

    Colson Whitehead

    2 shared recommenders

  9. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

    The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

    Isabel Wilkerson

    2 shared recommenders

  10. Things Fall Apart

    Things Fall Apart

    Chinua Achebe

    2 shared recommenders

  11. The Martian

    The Martian

    Andy Weir

    2 shared recommenders

  12. Sweetbitter

    Sweetbitter

    Stephanie Danler

    2 shared recommenders