This reading group guide for All the Light We Cannot See includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” ( Los Angeles Times). Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.ĭoerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” ( San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find.

With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. * COMING IN NOVEMBER AS A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES-from producer and director Shawn Levy ( Stranger Things ) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti *

All the light i cannot see