All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, published in 2014, is set during the Second World War and follows two young people whose stories run side by side. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind. She and her father Daniel live in Paris, where he works at the Museum of Natural History as its locksmith. When the German army invades Paris in 1940, the two of them leave the city for Saint-Malo and the house of her great-uncle Etienne, a reclusive veteran of the First World War who fills his home with radio broadcasts and recordings. Werner Pfennig is an orphan growing up in the mining town of Zollverein in Germany, where he and his sister Jutta listen to a radio he has repaired, and where his gift for the technology eventually takes him to a state military school and then to service tracking radio signals.

The novel is built in short chapters that alternate between the fighting for Saint-Malo in August 1944 and earlier material beginning in 1934, and the narration alternates between Marie-Laure and Werner, so the two strands are drawn closer together across the war. Marie-Laure learns her way through the streets around her great-uncle's house by handling a scale model of the neighbourhood that her father builds for her, while Werner's skill with transmitters and receivers, learned from scavenged parts, is the thing that decides where the war sends him.

The book was published by Scribner in May 2014 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, going on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was adapted as a four-part limited series released by Netflix in 2023.