All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

The “All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel” is an amazing story of courage and love set in the tragedies of the mid-20th century. Anthony Doerr is the author of this book. This is a beautifully written, highly engaging novel centred on two individuals caught up in the events leading up to and including World War II. The first is young, Marie-Laure life 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 the 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. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. It is a very nice story.