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All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel
Audiobook16 hours

All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

Written by Anthony Doerr

Narrated by Zach Appelman

4/5

()

About this audiobook

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller 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, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer "whose sentences never fail to thrill" (Los Angeles Times).

Editor's Note

One of the best of the decade…

Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is sensational — the rare book that takes a well-worn subject and adds an unforgettable spin. It follows the twin narratives of Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German orphan recruited to the military, at the height of WWII. The story is haunting, the imagery of war-torn France beautiful, and the characters so rich in depth that devouring the entire book feels inevitable.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
Release dateMay 6, 2014
ISBN9781442369375
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel
Author

Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelAll the Light We Cannot See. He is also the author of two story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector; the novel About Grace; and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

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Reviews for All the Light We Cannot See

4/5

7,320 ratings594 reviews

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  • 5/5
    Highly recommend this book. It's a great intertwining story of WW2 set in France and Germany.
  • 4/5
    Beautifully written book! It didn't touch me as much as some of my favorite books, but I loved the development of parallel plots twisting together at the end and the beautiful prose. Definitely a worthwhile read!
  • 5/5
    A great read. You just want more. The character development in this story are just fantastic. I found this book hard to put down once I started it.
  • 5/5
    So well done!
    I loved all of the characters, even the obsessive "bad guy" toward the end.
    What a great reminder of the depth of passion children can hold for things! Radios, reading, snails, birds, music, how wonderful is that child's keen perspective?!
  • 5/5
    "Read" as an audio book. The reader's voice (Jill Fox) contributed to appreciation of the descriptive language. Moving between points of view of 1)a blind French girl whose father dotes on her and who spends her days at the national museum where her father works; 2)an orphaned German teen who is skilled at math and makes a radio which leads to his "assignment" to a special Nazi unit for tracking partisan radio signals and who doesn't listen to his younger sister's warnings about implications; 3)an avaricious German officer with cancer.The well-developed inner life of the characters and the ways they were affected by the war, and the side characters made this an engrossing book.
  • 4/5
    An incredibly detailed and descriptive World War II tale. Beautifully written.
  • 4/5
    All the Light We Cannot See tells the stories leading up to the encounter of a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and a German orphan, Werner, during World War II. It's a long book, but the chapters are short and keeps it moving, and the characters are well written. You get a feel for them (emotions, personality, etc), the setting, and the events taking place. Anthony Doerr really knows how to write.

    Both characters start off as children before WWII but both can sense a change in their everyday life that leads to war. Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her father who works at a museum. they have to leave Paris with what might be the Sea of Flames, a diamond that is believed to be cursed causing the holder to live forever while the people closest suffer. They go to Saint Malo to stay with Marie's great uncle. Werner becomes fascinated with radios and able to fix any problem that comes up with one, he catches the attention of the German army and enters into the most prestigious school to train. He sees what is happening, doesn't like it morally but participates. He is pulled from school to track illegal radio broadcast for the German army and it leads him to Saint Malo. He has already seen the effects of war and is questioning what he has been told and has to decide if he is going to continue doing as he is told and expected or listen to his mind and hear. The book goes back and forth between the characters childhood and both of them being trapped somewhere in Saint Malo in different places, where eventually their stories come together. The book is so beautifully written, the pace is good, especially considering how long the book is, but the chapters make it fly by. It's a book you can settle into and get lost in.
  • 5/5
    I very much enjoyed Anthony Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See. Set mostly in Saint Malo, France during World War II, the novel is populated by terrific and interesting characters. It's solid storytelling.The book's main characters are Marie-Laure, a blind French teenager, who flees with her father, who may or may not be carrying precious cargo from a natural history museum and Werner, a German teen who longs for something more than working in a coal mine, which he gets, but that means becoming deeply involved with the Nazi cause. Their paths are on a collision course and it was interesting to see what happened when they met.The book is well written -- there are a bunch of timeline jumps that were handled well enough not to be bothersome. This novel definitely lived up to expectations.
  • 5/5
    Set in WWII, this story travels back and forth between two young people. Marie-Laure, a blind girl who lives with her father, who is the lock-keeper at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Her father builds miniatures of their neighborhood so Marie-Laure can find her way around. Meanwhile, Werner is a German orphan with a remarkable talent for building radios. The war forces Marie-Laure out of Paris to St. Milo and forces Werner into Hitler's army. Woven through this a uniqe, enormous diamond, and the ways in which it is protected and searched out.I often avoid war stories because they are so painful, but this one is so beautifully written and you immediately connect to the two main characters, that the brutality of war is secondary. I believe the light we cannot see is the light of individuals in the darkness of war.
  • 4/5
    I really liked the story. I found portions of it to drag a bit but overall a great historical fiction read!
  • 5/5
    What a great read - completely lived up to the hype. I love historical fiction and this is historical fiction at its finest. It is hard not to make an emotional connection to both of the main characters - an orphan German boy recruited into the Nazi Youth, and the young French bind girl who is forced to cope with a relocation and life under German occupation. Their growth and views of life are deep and real. This is a sad time in history and this book helps the reader feel like they are a part of it.
  • 5/5
    Beautifully written. Will stay with me a long time. Deserves every bit of critical acclaim it received.
  • 5/5
    Beautiful, sad, reflective
  • 5/5
    This book is not a page turner like many of the books I read, but it is a really great story. It takes place in WWII and is a story of intersecting lives, frailties and purpose. Really it should be a must read.
  • 5/5
    This is by far the best book I've read this year. Absolutely beautiful. Beautiful writing, beautiful characters.
    Doerr's writing is smooth and the story just flows. I am so glad to have read it and been on this journey.
  • 4/5
    Yes, another WWII book, but it's still good. Two main storylines (and a minor third) weave back and forth between the past and the WWII present and then move on to current present. It's artfully done, suspenseful and climatic and touching. I especially noted that the author's narrative relating to the blind girl is really her perspective -- all the descriptions are tactile or scented or aural -- nothing visual, and the scene in my imagination was dark and not very visual as a result. Very well done.
    Significant worldview question in this story: do we have choices about our life's pathway? Frederick says he does not, and yet he does. Same with Vern. What about the others? Did the enlisted/drafted/coerced German soldiers have a choice? The Russians? The news each country heard was so skewed, what is truth? What was the war about? Do these skews exist today? Do we hear the news knowing there is skew or do we forget and think we hear what's true?

    Definitely worth reading. Appropriate for high school aged kids, too.
  • 5/5
    Phenominal
  • 5/5
    What a beautiful story! I'll be thinking of this book for a while, there was just so much to love about it.
  • 5/5
    a novel that shows what war does to ordinary people. it is a wonderful and emotional story
  • 4/5
    I enjoyed this book although it was heartbreaking at times. The characters seemed real and I liked how the author eventually had them all converge. Warning that it is not all neat and tidy at the end so be prepared for a real life war ending.
  • 4/5
    This book ticked a lot of the boxes for me. I am a big fan of short chapters. I just love them, neat, short and concise. The book is beautifully written with several relationships that develop, some lasting and others not. There are some happy moments and some sad. The time span was a little confusing at first as I wasn't paying attention to the dates at the beginning of the sections. But once I did, they flowed quite nicely although I'm not a fan of books that jump over periods of time.Marie-Laure is a young, strong girl, who although blind doesn't let that get into her way. I liked her a lot. Her relationship with her father is a good one and I enjoyed reading about them. Werner, the German orphan, a lovely, young, intelligent boy who has his sister, Frau Elena and the other orphans and is destined for working in the mines. This book is written mainly about these two, each facing different things and eventually they make a connection.The book is just over 500 pages but doesn't seem like that was too many. Once I got to page 380 or so, I stayed up all night to finish it as there was an urgency to find out what was going to happen. The 4 stars instead of 5 is solely because of the ending. I didn't feel a sense of completion, and it didn't end the way I expected it to.
  • 4/5
    Phenomenal, beautifully written. I loved the format, the length of each chapter, the back and forth, the questions raised and not quite answered, the room it left to ponder and wonder and believe and disbelieve. If there was a minor negative it would have been the rushed ending, but even that was all it needed to be.
  • 5/5
    One of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. And one of the greatest. I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize.
  • 3/5
    I listened to the the version read by Zack Appleman. Apparently there is another version with a different narrator. This narrator is terrible. He has no distinctions for the characters and no accents either. He is boring compared to other narrators such as the narrator for the The Book Thief. Although the vocal is very disappointing,it is an intriguing story of 2 families; one French, one German, living during WWII. The German boy, enters the Nazi army with amazing skills in math and electronics. His life becomes very emotionally complex and the author stays away from the "bad Nazi" stereotype. The French family is an older widowed man with a blind daughter who works in a museum and trains his daughter to be independent. Although the story is rich in character development, the ending was very disappointing and seemed unresolved to me. If the author's intent was to communicate the futility of this material world, the destruction of war, life's unresolved problems, and one's resignation that life can be depressing,.....then the author succeeded. If this is made into a movie, and it could be, I hope the screenwriter takes some liberties and brings a little joy into the story.
  • 4/5
    I started and stopped this book 2x - I just couldn't get past the first few chapters. What a surprise this book turned out to be - the characters came alive and I was instantly transported to Europe during the height of World War II. Illuminating and thought provoking - I didn't want it to end.
  • 4/5
    This is very fine and deserving of its recognition because of the light shot through Doerr's prose. He is fond of elevating the adjectival phrase to a sentence which lends passages a staccato building intensity, and often lyrical beauty. The narrator would be a natural scientist, in love with whelks and mollusks. The story is braided, three threads, that of the blind girl, the thieving Nazi jewel hunter and Werner the child prodigy. In imitation of Mary Robison, scenes are chapters, less is more even despite the rich language. You are pulled along. The book, unfortunately, becomes sentimental at the end with ending after ending as if Spielberg was requiring that every plot turn is accounted for. More asperity and ambiguity would have been preferred. While you are in it, the book works its magic but then when you step back even a quarter step you become skeptical. The kids listened to a man broadcasting and then years later in the middle of the war find their way to that house. Wasn't necessary and a bit too pat. It made the book popular and it rubbed the bellies of those who couldn't tolerate anything tattered or unresolved, but it still doesn't ultimately dampen the experience. He is not Don Delillo. It is not the plot that we read for but for the momentary phosphorescence and that is here and worth it.
  • 5/5
    Marie Laure, a girl afflicted with blindness is taken from her home in Paris, France to try and save her and her father's life. They flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast. There she tries to make sense of her new home, but her father is captured, her Great Uncle dies, and his housekeeper passes away as well. Marie Laure finds herself very much alone in the world. Her story is paralleled with a young boy conscripted into the German army, their paths cross eventually, and both are effected by the encounter.
  • 4/5
    I read this now, since it's next month's book club book. It took me a little while to get into this book (probably because I'd read Jodi Picoult's The Storyteller so recently), but once it grabbed me the story lines were very interesting. The exposition/setup was a bit slow, but the way everything comes together makes it well worth reading.
  • 4/5
    Poetic story. See the side of the war from different perspective.
  • 3/5
    This novel had the most flowing language. Very well-written and I really loved that the chapters were rather short.Marie-Laure and Werner were great characters, as well as the other minor characters in the novel.I was personally a little disappointed by the ending, but it is not my work, so it is as it is.Terrible things happen during war. There are always two sides and you are not always going to agree with one side.