All The Light We Cannot See - Softcover

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
The most acclaimed and beloved novel of 2014, over a half year on the New York Times bestseller list—“hauntingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “incandescent, luminous, enthralling” (O, The Oprah Magazine).

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind. 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. They carry with them perhaps the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a German mining town, an orphan named Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. He becomes expert at fixing these new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. Increasingly 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.

Anthony 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 “beautiful, daring, heartbreaking, oddly joyous novel” (The Seattle Times) from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).