All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr Published by Simon and Schuster on May 6, 2014
Genres: Fiction / General, Fiction / Historical / 20th Century / World War II & Holocaust, Fiction / Historical / General, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Media Tie-In, Fiction / Places / Europe, Fiction / War & Military
Pages: 531
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*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).
This book was a The Book Girls’ Guide In Case You Missed It (ICYMI) Reading Challenge: 2026 Edition for February. You read that right, February. The hoops I jumped through to get this book in my hands (or ears, actually) is a story of itself. I wasn’t going to tell it, but since I can’t seem to gather reasonable thoughts, here we go! Libby. . . 8 weeks wait for eBook and Audio. At that point, I just put a hold on both and let the best option win. Except 2 weeks left, and suddenly it’s literally no longer available, my hold has a big red marker on it telling me I am never going to get this book. Went to search again, and not available, and wasn’t ever showing as available on Hoopla. Step in the bestie with her library and another long wait, but it did come my way! I mean, I get the popularity of an older book since Netflix picked it up, but even that was a few years ago. I can’t believe there are that many in my small corner of the world doing the Book Girls Guide challenge, I am, but here we are. Well, that little sidebar didn’t do much to help my brain put words together.
If I am going to be a thousand percent honest, I struggled with this book. I really think choosing the audiobook route (the fastest option from a hold perspective) did not do the book a good service. Not because the audio was bad, it was absolutely amazing, but because . . . well, let me tell you. All the words. So many words. Too many words. It’s a 16-hour listen (little less as I listen at 1.25 speed) and the chapters, for the most part, are hours long. Apparently, however, in the book itself, that is not the case, and it breaks it up a lot more (almost 200 chapters). Due to the long chapters (in the audio) and all the words (literally all of them), there is no multitasking while listening to this book. I frequently felt lost and confused, and not even sure who was doing what at times. I did listen for well over the promised 16 hours as I felt myself frequently rewinding to catch up.
And here is where I tell on myself. I broke my own, not hardfast but still there, rule and found myself watching the Netflix series just to, maybe, help congeal some things together I probably missed in my listening marathon. I’ve yet to find a movie as good as the book, and there are actually movies I refuse to watch (looking at you, Gone With the Wind) because I love the book so much and don’t want to hate the movie. Here’s the real deal. This is a solid, really, really good take on WW2. You don’t even get stories that show the German side often, and when you do, they tend to feel patronizing and not real. All those words, they added depth and a level of detail that this story really needed to be told with depth and character development, and honestly, I’d read all those words again. Read, not listen, but still read.
BONUS CONTENT: I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to talk about the Netflix mini-series here or in its own post, but here it is. There’s a reason I don’t like reading a book and watching the movie (miniseries), and this book fits that bill as a great reminder. I feel like the show did a great job of providing filler for the things I missed while listening to the book, really taking the words and making them more digestible. BUT, there was a lot of literary license, and things were changed quite a bit, including the ending. Especially the ending. I loved the authentic casting as both actors who played Marie-Laure also have vision loss. I had to do a double-take when I spotted Hugh Laurie (I adore him as an actor). All in all, the miniseries does a great job of telling the larger story but misses the nuances of the details. It’s not completely true to the book (that ending!), but it is true to the story that needs to be told.
About Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of the story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, and the novels About Grace, All the Light We Cannot See, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award, a finalist for Novel of the Year in the British Book Awards, and winner of the Grand prix de littérature américaine in France.
Doerr’s short stories and essays have won five O. Henry Prizes and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, New American Stories, The Best American Essays, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, and many other places. His work has been translated into over forty different languages and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, four Pushcart Prizes, three Pacific Northwest Book Awards, five Ohioana Book Awards, the 2010 Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories, and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. All the Light We Cannot See was a #1 New York Times bestseller and remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for over 200 weeks in hardcover.
Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho. Though he is often asked, as far as he knows he is not related to the late writer Harriet Doerr.
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