All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr📖

Summary of All the Light We Cannot See

The novel “All the Light We Cannot See” follows two main characters: Marie-Laure is a blind 16-year-old French girl, who, at the onset of the Second World War, flees to Saint-Malo in Brittany. She takes refuge with her great-uncle, a reclusive man who broadcasts secret messages by radio transmitter. The second protagonist, Werner, is a German orphan with a fascination for radio technology. At the age of 18, he is sent to the ‘Wehrmacht’, the German army, where he serves in a specialised team tasked with tracking illegal radio signals. Their stories intertwine during the Battle of Saint-Malo in 1944, when the US army lays siege to the town. A significant subplot involves the pursuit of a diamond known as the ‘Sea of Flames’.

Reasons to read All the Light We Cannot See 

“All the Light We Cannot See” is a compelling anti-war novel that alternates its chapters between the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner. The novel portrays them as likeable yet flawed characters rather than as traditional heroes or villains. Science, in particular radio technology, plays an important role in this novel. Anthony Doerr, an American author, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with this novel in 2014. “All the Light We Cannot See” became a bestseller in the United States and internationally, selling over 15 million copies, and was adapted into a Netflix miniseries in 2023.

Setting: Saint-Malo, Brittany (France) & Zollverein, Essen (Germany)

Original title: All the Light We Cannot See

Year of publication: 2014

Nr of pages: 544