All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See is a 2014 novel by American author Anthony Doerr, published by Scribner on May 6 of that year. Set during the Second World War, it follows two young people whose lives unfold on opposing sides of the conflict and who meet only at the end, in alternating chapters.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind girl who lives in Paris with her father, Daniel, the master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. When the Nazis occupy the capital, father and daughter flee to the walled coastal city of Saint-Malo, in Brittany, where they take refuge with Marie-Laure's great-uncle Étienne, a reclusive veteran of the First World War who broadcasts educational recordings over the radio. There circulates a legend about a diamond, the Sea of Flames, said to grant immortality at the cost of misfortune to everyone nearby. Werner Pfennig, meanwhile, is an orphan raised in a German mining town, whose exceptional gift for building and repairing radios wins him a place at an elite school that teaches Nazi values and later takes him into the army, where his unit hunts clandestine transmissions across occupied Europe.

Doerr arranges the novel nonlinearly. Chapters set during the Battle of Saint-Malo in August 1944 alternate with chapters that move forward chronologically from 1934. The book's underlying concern is the tension between war's destructiveness and people's capacity for compassion, with technology appearing both as an instrument of death and as a miracle of communication. The author, who spent about ten years writing and researching the book, has said the idea came to him after watching a train passenger grow frustrated when a phone call dropped, and that he wanted to write about appreciating everyday wonders.

The novel was widely praised. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and spent a long time on The New York Times bestseller list. Critics admired its lyrical prose, rich sensory detail and its characterization, though some found it overly sentimental. In 2023 Netflix released a four-part television adaptation.