LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever. My heart was stolen by Marie-Laure, who turned blind at six-years-old. We follow her endearing, and enduring friendship with the wonderful Werner, a German orphan, against the savage backdrop of the second world war. Never is our faith in the innate goodness of people more tested than during the horrors of war, but in these two characters we are reminded that no matter how great the odds against you, hope and kindness will remain long after the final bullets have been fired. One of my all time favourites.
Selected by Chris Whitaker, Our Spring 2022 Guest Editor. Click here to read the full Guest Editor Piece.
*
One of our Books of the Year 2015.
May 2015 Book of the Month.
Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
A big book in every way, powerful, intensely moving and awe inspiring. It traces the lives of blind Marie and orphan Werner through World War II. Werner is a whizz with fixing things and is pushed into Hitler’s Youth and on into the heart of the fighting until he lands up in St Malo on the Brittany coast where he meets Marie. Marie has fled there from Paris as the Germans advanced. The novel takes us through to the present. It is an epic story of the horror of war, the suffering and endurance illuminated with many acts of kindness. Beautifully written, it is a memorable, haunting tale. Doerr is an author to note being chosen by Granta as one of 21 Best Young American Novelists of the moment. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
Reviewed by Sarah BroadhurstSarah Broadhurst spent her early working life in the book trade in both retail and wholesale until the arrival of children forced her to look for freelance work she could do from…
More reviews by Sarah Broadhurst About All the Light We Cannot See
*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES--from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*
Read the full description
Find This Book In
About
All the Light We Cannot See Synopsis
*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).
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781668017340 |
| Publication date: |
3rd October 2023 |
| Author: |
Anthony Doerr |
| Publisher: |
Scribner Book Company |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
560 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
|
| Other Genres: |
|
| Recommendations: |
|
Press Reviews
Anthony Doerr Press Reviews
'This jewel of a story is put together like a vintage timepiece ... Doerr's writing and imagery are stunning. It's been a while since a novel had me under its spell in this fashion.'
Abraham Verghese, author of 'Cutting for Stone'
All the Light We Cannot See is a dazzling, epic work of fiction. Anthony Doerr writes beautifully about the mythic and the intimate, about snails on beaches and armies on the move, about fate and love and history and those breathless, unbearable moments when they all come crashing together - Jess Walter, author of 'Beautiful Ruins'
'Doerr sees the world as a scientist, but feels it as a poet. He knows about everything-radios, diamonds, mollusks, birds, flowers, locks, guns-but he also writes a line so beautiful, creates an image or scene so haunting, it makes you think forever differently about the big things-love, fear, cruelty, kindness, the countless facets of the human heart ... Doerr's new novel is that novel, the one you savor, and ponder, and happily lose sleep over, then go around urging all your friends to read-now.' - J.R. Moehringer, author of 'Sutton and 'The Tender Bar'
Author
About Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome and Memory Wall. Doerr's short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Rome Prize, and shared the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award with Jonathan Safran Foer. In 2007 Granta placed Doerr on its list of the 21 Best Young American novelists. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Author photo © Jerry Bauer
More About Anthony Doerr
