When Germany invades France in 1940, Marie-Laure and Daniel flee to the coastal town of Saint-Malo to take refuge with her great-uncle Etienne, a reclusive, shell-shocked veteran of the Great War who spends his time broadcasting old records of his dead brother across Europe. The only way to end the curse is to return the stone to the ocean, its rightful owner. Marie-Laure hears stories about a diamond known as the Sea of Flames that is hidden within the museum the diamond is said to grant immortality at the cost of endless misfortune to those around the owner. Marie-Laure went blind at the age of six in 1934, and Daniel helps Marie-Laure adapt to her blindness by creating a model of Paris for her to feel, and training her to navigate it.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a girl who lives in Paris with her father Daniel, the master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History.

A television adaptation produced by Netflix and 21 Laps Entertainment was announced in 2019 and is scheduled for release on November 2, 2023. Several publications considered it to be among the best books of 2014, and it won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. All the Light We Cannot See was on The New York Times Best Seller list for over 200 weeks and ultimately sold over 15 million copies. Scribner published the novel on May 6, 2014, to commercial and critical success. He decided to set the novel in World War II with a focus on the Battle of Saint-Malo after a book trip to the town in 2005. Doerr felt the man was unappreciative of the 'miracle' of being able to communicate across long distances. The story has moral themes such as the dangers of greed and the nature of sacrifice, and portrays Doerr's fascination with science and nature.ĭoerr's first inspiration came from a 2004 train ride, during which he watched a man become angry because his telephone call cut out. The narrative has a nonlinear structure, flashing between the Battle of Saint-Malo and the events leading up to it.

The novel is written in a poetic style, and almost all of the chapters alternate between Marie-Laure's story and Werner's story, both of which parallel each other. The novel is set during World War II and centers around the characters Marie-Laure Leblanc, a blind French girl who takes refuge in her uncle's house in Saint-Malo after Paris is invaded by Nazi Germany, and Werner Pfennig, a bright German boy who is accepted into a military school because of his skills in radio technology, before being sent to the military. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionĪll the Light We Cannot See is a 2014 war novel by American author Anthony Doerr.

Book by anthony doerr