Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and has spent over 80 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, is one of the most beautiful and finely-crafted novels I have ever read. His language is spell-binding, even incantatory, and the intertwined narratives that he composes are deeply involving.
Doerr delicately weaves together the stories of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl, and Werner Pfennig, an albino German boy, which unfold during the awful years of the Second World War. Due to his technical brilliance, Werner is assigned to a Hitler Youth training camp for the best and brightest in the Reich. There he becomes a master at detecting and interpreting radio signals. Marie-Laure is spirited out of Paris by her devoted father when the Nazis overwhelm northern France, and she is transported to the mysterious and enchanting sea-side city of Saint-Malo, where she takes up residence with her great uncle, who had not left his home since returning from the First World War.
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