All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

A must-read book of the season, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, $27) opens on the Breton coast in the days just following D-Day. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl who escaped from Paris with her father but is alone while Allied planes drop leaflets and German artillery batters the town of Saint-Malo. Werner, a young German radio operator, is trapped in the basement of a bombed-out building just blocks away. Doerr’s exquisitely plotted novel traces the paths of Marie-Laure and Werner from childhood to their inevitable meeting. Short chapters move the story at a brisk pace, and Doerr’s unerring eye for detail makes the book hard to put down and impossible to forget.