All the Light We Cannot See
All the Light We Cannot See
A blind girl in France and a German boy who can fix radios. Doerr spent ten years making sure their paths were worth crossing.
Two Lives, One War
Anthony Doerr's 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner follows two characters across World War II: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl whose father smuggles a legendary diamond out of Paris before the Nazi occupation, and Werner Pfennig, a German orphan with a gift for radio electronics who is recruited into the Wehrmacht. Their lives converge in the walled city of Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast in August 1944. Doerr spent ten years writing the novel, researching the science of radio waves and the geography of every location. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015 and was adapted into a Netflix series in 2023.
Reading All the Light We Cannot See
Convergence
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Part
"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
"Anthony Doerr · All the Light We Cannot See
Doerr spent ten years writing the novel while also raising two sons and teaching writing. He researched it so thoroughly that residents of Saint-Malo recognised his precise descriptions of streets and buildings.
The title refers to the invisible radio waves that carry voices across the air, which Werner tracks throughout the novel, as well as to all the unseen goodness in the world that the war tries to extinguish.