Because, look, if I read one book a week for the next forty years, I’m only going to get to read 2,080 more books. Now that it’s summer again, I’m taking my opportunity to read whatever I want seriously. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.I spent the first half of this year reeling beneath a perpetually renewing tower of MFA student manuscripts. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. 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 them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. 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. Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. What more can we ask for from a great book?įrom the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant bestseller 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.

And he confronts the most potent questions of why we are put on this earth and how we fight our face our biggest obstacles together without betraying the angels of our better nature. Each sentence sings, imbued with great moral and emotional resonance. We watch throughout as these two young people who have bottomed out or nearly so families rather than retreat into their shells like Marie-Laure’s beloved mollusks, instead, again and again, confront darkness with light.Īnthony Doerr is a special writer and in All the Light We Cannot See he is at the height of his powers.

These skills eventually get him enlisted in resistance efforts. Across the border, Werner a German orphan develops a knack for repairing radios and interpreting their frequencies. There she becomes fascinated by mollusks and studies them zealously each day. Marie-Laure, a young blind French girl, has just fled Paris with her father to hide away with her uncle who lives by the sea. The novel flits between the perspective of two young people muddling through the violence and confusion of WWII and life under occupation.

Anthony Doerr’s opus, All the Light We Cannot See, is a book filled to the brim with such acts. This makes it all the more remarkable when people in these circumstances nonetheless choose courageously to practice kindness and care in acts small and large. In times of great hardship, it is easy to become cynical and despair.

Anthony doerr books