All The Light we cannot see

by Anthony Doerr

This is a sprawling 530-page novel, winner of this year’s Pulitzer prize for fiction, about a girl and her father in Paris, and what befalls them when the Nazi occupation of Paris drives them out. The girl, Marie-Laure, had become blind by the age of six. Her father is a locksmith who works at the Museum of Natural History. As his daughter’s sight finally fails, her father builds her a model of Paris, and in this way she is able to navigate around the city.
In a parallel story, a young boy in Germany, Werner, an orphan, comes to the notice of the Nazis for his astonishing skill at fixing radios, and this leads to his relocation to an elite school aimed at providing skills for the Reich.
The Guardian

Impressions by the group as noted by Anne

Generally, everyone found this book a good read and the thriller part in it makes it a real page turner .

The chapters are short and they go back and forth from one of the main  characters to the other, from France to  Germany during WW II  .

We have discovered  two  different worlds , well described and the characters  really came to life thanks to a minute description . We felt a lot of empathy for :

-Marie-Laure, the French blind girl, lovingly looked after by her father who was so good at making her small world fit into the vast world of Life around her.

-Werner, the German boy happily living with his sister  in an orphanage, who, because he was so  clever, had been «  chosen »  to join the Hitler Youth training camps.

From then onward, we were confronted  with the cruelty and barbarism  of what was going on in these Nazi  camps.

Both characters came together at some point in the book.
The book had a red thread :   who keeps and where is  hidden  the most valuable gem from  the Mineralogy  Museum in Paris that was on « Hitler’s wish list »  of the most sought after works of art and precious artefacts ?

Blanka's comment shared by Paulette

"All the Light We Cannot See", although a kind of thriller, is very well written in a rich and beautiful language, and cleverly put together, like a jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces fall easily into place.

The description of life of a blind person under extremely difficult circumstances is excellent and the "war bits" had mostly an angle different from the usual. The ending was a bit difficult to figure out. I could have done without the  sort of epilogue tidying up the rest of Marie-Laure´s life - it was a bit of a let down, after all the tension in the story...