All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
Summary
Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind, and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, builds her a scale model of their neighbourhood so she can learn it by touch. Werner Pfennig is an orphan in a German coal town with an extraordinary gift for radios, which is his only route out of the mine that killed his father, and which delivers him into a Nazi military academy and then into a unit hunting illegal transmitters.
When Paris falls, Marie-Laure and her father flee to Saint-Malo with what may be a cursed diamond from the museum's collection. Werner's unit eventually arrives in the same walled city, in August 1944, as the Americans begin shelling it.
Doerr writes in very short chapters, often two pages, alternating between the two children and moving back and forth in time, which makes an enormous novel read quickly.
The supporting cast carries much of the weight. Marie-Laure's great uncle Etienne has not left his house since the previous war and broadcasts illegally from the attic. Werner's friend Frederick at the academy refuses one order and is destroyed for it, in the scene that tells you what the school is actually for. A German gemologist with a tumour hunts the diamond through occupied France.
The prose is lush and some readers find it overwritten. The cursed stone is the weakest element and several critics said so. What is beyond argument is the construction: two children on opposite sides converging on one house, and a radio that has connected them since before either understood it. Best for readers who want a war novel that is fundamentally kind.
Historical Context & Significance
All the Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The board described an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of the Second World War, written in short elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Anthony Doerr spent about ten years on it, and it was also a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Commercially it became one of the most successful Pulitzer winners in modern memory, spending years on bestseller lists and passing well beyond the usual literary readership. Netflix adapted it as a four part series in 2023, casting a blind actress as Marie-Laure, to a reception considerably cooler than the novel's.