All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See is a big, beautifully crafted Second World War novel that became a worldwide bestseller and won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is easy to see why: it is moving, accessible and built with the precision of a fine clock.

The novel follows two young people whose paths slowly converge. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl whose father, a locksmith at the Paris natural history museum, builds her detailed models of their neighbourhood so she can learn to navigate it. When the Germans occupy Paris, the two flee to the walled coastal town of Saint-Malo. Werner is a German orphan from a mining town with a gift for radios, whose talent wins him a place at a brutal Nazi academy and then a role tracking resistance radio signals.

Doerr tells the story in very short chapters, often only a page or two, alternating between the two characters and jumping across time, all building towards the Allied bombing of Saint-Malo in August 1944. The effect is cinematic and compulsively readable. A legendary cursed diamond adds a thread of adventure.

The prose is the book’s chief pleasure. Doerr writes with sensory richness, especially in Marie-Laure’s chapters, where the world comes through sound, touch and smell. Radio waves, shells, snails and the sea all become images of invisible connections between people.

There are fair criticisms. The short-chapter structure can feel manipulative, and the diamond subplot and its Nazi hunter edge towards melodrama. Some readers find the novel too neat and sentimental for its subject, with the moral complexity of Werner’s complicity softened rather than fully explored.

Still, its central idea lingers: that goodness can survive in small acts, even in the worst of times. The novel was adapted as a Netflix limited series in 2023.