Anthony Doerr

A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast. By the award-winning author of About Grace.

A Novel

All the Light We Cannot See

Frank Huang

Three blocks to the east, Frank Volkheimer blinks as he sits in a devastated apartment on the corner of the rue des Lauriers and the rue Thévenard, eating from a tin of sweet yams with his fingers. Across the river mouth, beneath four feet of concrete, an aide holds open the garrison commander's jacket as the colonel swings one arm through one sleeve, then the other. At precisely the same moment, a nineteen-year-old American scout climbing the hillside toward the pillboxes stops and turns and reaches an arm down for the soldier behind him; while, with his cheekbone pressed to a granite paver at Fort National, Etienne LeBlanc decides that if he and Marie-Laure live through this, whatever happens, he will let her pick a place on the equator and they will go, book a ticket, ride a ship, fly an airplane, until they stand together in a rain forest surrounded by flowers they've never smelled, listening to birds they've never heard. Three hundred miles away from Fort National, Reinhold von Rumpel's wife wakes her daughters go to Mass and contemplates the good looks of her neighbor who has returned from the war without one of his teet. Not all that far from her, Jutta Pfennig sleeps in the ultramarine shadows of the girl' dormitory and dreams of light thickening and settling across a field like snow; and not all that far from Jutta, the führer raises a glass of warm (but never boiled) milk to his lips, a slice of Oldenburg black bread on his plate and a whole apple beside it, his daily breakfast; while in a ravine outside Kiev, two inmates rub their hands in sand because they have become slippery, and then they take up the stretcher again while a sonderkommando stirs the fire below them with a steel pole; a wagtail fits from flagstone to flagstone in a courtyard in Berlin, searching for snails to eat; and at the Napola school at Schulpforta, one hundred and nineteen twelve- and thirteen-year-olds wait in a queue behind a truck to be handed thirty-pound antitank land mines, boys who, in almost exactly eight months, marooned amid the Russian advance, the entire school cut off like an island, will be given a box of the Reich's last bitter chocolate and Wehrmacht helmets salvaged from dead soldiers, and then this final harvest of the nation's youth will rush out with the chocolate melting in their guts and overlarge helmets bobbing on their shorn heads and sixty Panzerfaust rocket launchers in their hands in a last spasm of futility to defend a bridge that no longer requires defend-ing, while T-34 tanks from the Red Army come clicking and rumbling toward them to destroy them all, every last child; dawn in Saint-Malo, and there is a twitch on the other side of the wardrobe— Werner hears Marie-Laure inhale, Marie-Laure hears Werner scrape three fingernails across the wood, a sound not unlike the sound of a record coursing beneath the surface of a needle, their faces an arm's reach apart.

Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. But when the Nazis invade, father and daughter flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father's life, until he discovers a knack for engineering. His talent wins him a place at a brutal military academy, but his way out of obscurity is built on suffering. At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in. Doerr's combination of soaring imagination and meticulous observation is electric.

angie

Madame Manec brushes Marie- hair in long absentminded strokes. "Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?"  

Open you eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and then a piano comes on, playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smokestacks fallen, an ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility.

Srijita Sarkar 

Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening  off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light.

Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world. He captures snowflakes, tadpoles, hibernating frogs; he coaxes bread from bakers with none to sell; he regularly appears in the kitchen with fresh milk for the babies. He makes things too: paper boxes, crude biplanes, toy boats with working rudders.

A cloth bag containing 20 paperback copies of the title that may also include a folder with sign out sheets.

Laura Wilson

She says, "When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?"

"Of course it matters. I want to be an engineer and you want to study birds. Be like that American painter in the swamps. Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?" 

A stillness in the room. Out there in the trees beyond Frederick's window hangs an alien light. 

"Your problem, Werner." says Frederick, "is that you still believe you own your life." 

She lets him wash her hair. Over and over Marie-Laure trawls her fingers through the suds, as though trying to gauge their weight. There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules. All those Parisian mothers pushing buggies through the Jardin des Plantes or holding up cardigans in department stores-it seemed to him that those women nodded to each other as they passed, as though each possessed some secret knowledge that he did not. How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing? 

There is pride, too, though - pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how he feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane. 

anne

Aber Werner hat bereits den Rand des Feldes überschritten, tritt auf eine Mine, die von der eigenen Wehrmacht vot drei Monaten gelegt wurde, und verschwindet in einer Erdfontäne.

Weißrussische T-34-Panzer werden auf sie zupoltern und sie allesamt töten, jedes einzelne Kind.

"Am Ende", murmelt Volkheimer, als der Lastwagen anfährt, "kommen wir alle nicht daran vorbei."

Und im Schrank ist kein Sender, sonder ein Kind sitz darin, mit einer Kugel im Kopf. Es ist das Mädchen von der Schaukel, das nicht älter als sieben Jahre sein kann.

Wie seltsam, zu denken, dass die Stimme des Mannes noch durch die Luft fliegt, bereits ein Land weiter ist und mit jedem Kilometer schwächer wird.

Er klingt wie ihr Vater , wenn er kurz davorstand, etwas dummes zu tun.

"Eine Frau in Rennes hat neun Monate Gefängnis dafür bekommen, dass sie ihre Schweine Goebbels genannt hat, wussten Sie das?"

Er wirkt weniger bedrohlich, eher wie ein großmütiges, übergroßes Kind. Mehr wie der Mensch, zu den er wird, wenn er Musik hört.

"Ich habe mir vorgestellt, wenn das Signal kraftvoll genug wäre, könnte mein Bruder mich hören. Dass ich ihm etwas Frieden bringen und ihn beschützen könnte, wie er mich immer beschützt hat."

"Sie haben gesagt, sie wollen uns nicht mit einem Halbblut zusammen schwimmen lassen, das sei unhygienisch. Ein Halbblut, Werner. Sind wir das nicht auch? Sind wir nicht zur Hälfte unsere Mutter und zur Hälfte unser Vater?"

"Sie meinen, eine Halbjüdin. Red nicht so laut. Wir sind keine Halbjuden."

Samantha Milfort

Don't you want to be alive before you die?"

Beatrix

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Étienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear. The Milky Way a fading river. He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.

A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he's loking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.

Nikola

Keila Rico 

Jacey Manning

first time read rating: 3.75 stars (didn't complete)

Tali ⋆.˚🦋༘⋆

first time read rating: 3.75 stars (didn't complete)

second time read rating: 5 stars

Maureen

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

***

Longest book I’ve read this year! The prose is one of the best I’ve read. Honestly got hooked because of its lovely cover and title... though the content doesn’t disappoint! The short chapters (1-2 pages) easily make it a page-turner. Everything is so vivid— Doerr does Marie Laure’s character justice. 4 stars because it’s such a slow burn that I dropped this halfway—however, I think it’s also one of the book’s strong points because the characters are properly fleshed out as a result. The ending felt anticlimactic, but I don’t usually read historical fiction so I can’t judge. Nevertheless, I’m glad I finally finished reading this and I truly understand why plenty of people love this book.

One of the best books I have ever read. Everything about it interested me so much. I thought it was really interesting to have 2 points of view with little connections to each other that are actually really important. I love the well-developed characters and the interesting plot. The ending left me in tears but it was worth it.

Heard good things about this book and was recommend it by some friends. It did not disappoint. It was a beautifully written story.

Jazz

Chris Dailey

Engrossing and beautiful fiction about two teens, one French, the other German, caught up in the machine of WWII. Told in 2-4 page bursts, the story operates in flashbacks with an anchor in the fall of the fortress city of Saint Malo in 1944. The two precocious protagonists deal with loss of family, longing for a normal life, stunted intellectual curiosity, and the horrors of war. Despite their national allegiances, the two seems to be one in the sense that they're looking for the same thing: the chance to pursue their interests. Engaging writing moves the narrative along quickly and could have benefited from a slower pace.

It was a gorgeous, heartfelt and poignant book about a blind girl in the midst of the Second World War.

Harriet 

Rec from Charlotte and Ella. I’m so sad guys. This was gut wrenching in a whole different way than expected. 

A beautiful, subtle book, very moving and clever.

Emma Randall

Crystal Mfeka

Luke Harkness

Just wasn't as big a fan of it as I hoped I would be. The chapters were too short, I just couldn't connect the characters, it jumped around times too frequently.

maitha mana

'Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever'

At first I didn't want another WW2 novel. Then I realised this was something special.

3 of 5 stars

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Finally, I've read this book. I was craving for something historical and I remember having this on my TBR for such a long time. But unfortunately, it ended up being quite a disappointment for me. I knew that it was in WWII setting and I expected a very emotional and heartbreaking story. It was heartbreaking in its own way but not heartbreaking enough for my own taste. I didn't get attached to it as much as I wanted it to and the symbolism of the diamond in the story was not very helpful to achieve it. 
It was still a good read, don't get me wrong. It's just that I hope I went into it without having too much expectation. Maybe I would have liked it more that way.

Audrey

Pamela Koh

Superb. Enjoyed every harrowing, hopeful, beautiful, disturbing, sad, happy moment of it. 

Mark Phillips

Tatiana

All the Light We Cannot See: 4/5

Wow, this book was beautiful. All the Light We Cannot See mainly follows two characters at the end of WW2 in a French town called Saint-Malo. The Allies are shelling the city to drive the Nazis out which is where we meet Marie Laure, a blind girl who fled with her uncle and father from Paris, and Werner a youth in the German Army specializing in radios. From here, the book jumps in time describing how the two main characters got to this place, and their experiences throughout the war. 

There is an underlining plot that drives the two characters together, but what truly made this book special is the journey they took and the people they met along the way. The small shots of life are what was breathtaking, and Doerr's writing made it difficult to put down. 

Doerr treats these characters with such care all the way until the end and it's heartbreaking in the best way. His words weave an incredible picture full of metaphor and perfect craftsmanship that is nothing short of a marvel. 

I really loved this book and would recommend it to all who like historical fiction.

Annika Arguemore

The physical manifestation of hurt and tragedy. It was so exceptionally written, and detailed down to the bone. I also loved how the writer wrote so poetically. The unexpected event that led to the unsatisfactory, and too peaceful ending will haunt me for weeks. This is going to keep me up at night. Thanks, Anthony.

Jensyn Ronca

A bit of a slow start and lost me at some points, but overall really beautifully written. The ending made up for the beginning. Some of the characters were difficult to feel attached to, but others were so easy to get attached to. I will be thinking about Werner as well as Frederick for quite some time

“To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her: it is like medicine”

★★★ // i still feel the same way about this as i did in the first few pages — the structure did not work for me, especially the short chapters and description-heavy narrative. but it it sends a strong message about the senselessness of war. how so many lives are altered and ruined by the greed of a few.

what a time to be reading this, with all that is happening in the world. all the more i am conflicted about Werner, a N*zi, and what the novel was trying to make me feel or understand about him.

the female characters, Marie-Laure, Madame Manec, and Jutta were the most fascinating parts of this book. i especially felt for Jutta in the last parts, her grief and sorrow combined with shame so palpable.

towards the end of this book, i don’t know why i was trying to look for something hopeful. there were some bits of it, sure. but i realize that my naivete got the best of me. there is little hope after experiencing a war. even the small things could remind you of a traumatic experience. life carries on, and somehow you get a bit better, but it will always follow you like a shadow.

what a time to have read this, with all that is happening in Palestine. so many lives taken — people who only wanted to live, but could not.

(my one strong criticism of this book: i hated that one chapter with Frau Elena and the girls in Berlin, with the Russians. i did not think it was necessary, and i certainly did not appreciate that it had to be so graphically vivid like that.)

—

i read Pachinko this year, and it was so well-written and had this amazing characterization and shifts among multiple POVs. i guess this is why this book dims in comparison for me personally.

All the Light We Cannot See A Novel

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