All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

Okay folks, I know I am somewhat late to the party but being on furlough due to the Coronavirus, I thought I would try a book NOT in my usual crime/mystery/thriller reading genre.

All the Light We Cannot See is the work of historical fiction set mostly around the Second World War in France and Germany. The two principal characters are a blind girl in France and a short boy in Germany. Follow these two children as they grow up and meet the many challenges they face when Europe becomes a war zone.

This book is written in American English and Anthony has a tremendous vocabulary. His writing is of very high quality and is very descriptive. There is a lot of detail thrown into this story and I loved reading about the ins and outs of radio. A lot of research has gone into this novel which made it such a fulfilling read. Anthony really got to grips with telling his story from the perspective of a blind person…

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away.

...I liked how memories were created within the story, using phrases and tag lines that would be revisited later in this novel. Character development was wonderful and gentle, giving the impression that you the reader were growing up alongside them. 

All the Light We Cannot See is a very long read that runs to 532 pages. The time frame drifts about a lot, basically before the war and during the war. The last ten per cent of this book is more contemporary, following a linear time frame of two sections, 1974 and 2014. One of my pet hates are novels that roll backwards and forwards in time. Because this book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015, I thought I would bear with it. I decided to ignore the wandering time frames and coupled with the repeated memories, phrases and tag lines, I felt as though I was living the life through those eras. These shifting time frames made this novel very reflective of times we have not lived. It gave me access to another world before I was born and a world that I cannot see with my eyes - a world using other senses which blind people have to cope with every day of their lives. This is far more detailed than helping blind passengers travel on my coach.

I got a lot from reading All the Light We Cannot See. It is very sad in places but then those were very sad times. I found this book an OUTSTANDING read and is worthy of adding to your bucket list of books to read before you die. This novel has become very popular and rightly so, a lot has been written about this book, so what more can I add? It took Anthony ten years to write his novel but the detail and quality shine through from start to finish, so it gets the top score of 5 stars from me.

All the Light We Cannot See is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook and was written in 2014.