All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

Average Rating 9/10 (1 Review)

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
National Book Award Finalist.
New York Times Bestseller.
Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Fiction.

A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel 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 has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. But when the Nazis invade, father and daughter flee with a dangerous secret.

Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father’s life, until he discovers a knack for engineering. His talent wins him a place at a brutal military academy, but his way out of obscurity is built on suffering.

At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in.

Doerr’s combination of soaring imagination and meticulous observation is electric. As Europe is engulfed by war and lives collide unpredictably, All the Light We Cannot See is a captivating and devastating elegy for innocence.

'This novel will be a piece of luck for anyone with a long plane journey or beach holiday ahead. It is such a page-turner, entirely absorbing… magnificent.'

'An epic and a masterpiece.'

Review by Ben Macnair (300417) Rating (9/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 9/10
All the Light We Cannot See if a novel that is sold as a book about war, but it is a lot more than that. With three main protagonists, it looks at war, at people, at redemption and humanity in its widest sense.

Marie Louise Leblanc has been blind since she was six, and Werner Penning has been an orphan, working in the same mine that killed his father. The final character is an old man, finding a world through his radio. War is never far away, but so too is hope, Marie Louise and Werner find that they have a lot in common, even when he is killed in action, and she survives all that the war has to offer her.

Marie is a woman of invention, not letting the tragedy that she lived through get to her. She looks after a small house that her father has made for her. Even though the Germans would like it, it doesn’t fall into their hands.

At just over four hundred pages, there is a lot in All the Light We Cannot See, but it requires that level of writing to get the many points across to the reader. The book is one of the best written books that has been released lately, looking at a time in our history, that we would much rather forget about.
Ben Macnair (30th April 2017)