Anthony Doerr (http://www.anthonydoerr.com/biography/) 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 and All the Light We Cannot See, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. Doerr’s writing has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.
Why not see if you agree with all these plaudits? The summary of All The Light We Cannot See is as follows. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.
In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.
Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr 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 his most ambitious and dazzling work. Do give this a try.
Enquire at your local library or consult http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Light-We-Cannot-See/dp/0008138303/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432017404&sr=1-1&keywords=all+the+light+we+cannot+see for full details.
544 pages in Fourth Estate paperback edition
First published 08 May 2014
ISBN 978-0007548699
Anthony Doerr