All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr This book is really two parallel stories set during World War II, about two children growing up in two different countries, with frequent switching between the two. Starting in 1944 the story goes back to 1934 to describe the situations of the two main characters: Werner who lives in an orphanage near Essen in Germany and Marie-Laure who lives with her father in Paris. Werner is an exceptionally bright boy who finds he has an aptitude to fixing radios, so when he finds an old radio he fixes it and he and his sister, Jutta, listen to it late at night becoming fascinated by a particular nightly science programme being broadcast from France. Soon people ask Werner to fix their radios until he is before long recruited to Hitler's Youth movement, much to his relief as he feared that he would have to work down the coal mines where his father was killed.

Marie-Laure became blind at the age of six from a degenerative disease, after which she started to accompany her father to the Natural History Museum each day, where he is a locksmith. In order to help her become independent, her father builds a miniature scale model of the area they live in to help her find her way around by learning different routes. Being a clever, intuitive girl she quickly learns her way around.

As war breaks out, Werner has to fight with the German army and, when the Germans attack Paris, Marie-Laure and her father must flee to Saint-Malo to live with her great-uncle. From the Museum they take with them, to save it from the Germans, an ancient, precious stone, the Sea of Flames, which legend says protects its owner but is a curse for his or her loved ones. Before long her father is obliged to make a trip to Paris, from which he will never return. We follow at length the war-time hardships of both Marie-Laure and Werner before they finally meet, briefly, in St Malo, where he saves her life, before being killed himself.

The book received largely positive reviews in the press, and some of the group thought the writing was vivid and sometimes lyrical, with much reflection on light. The sections on the flight from Paris and the bombing of St Malo were particularly admired. Others, however, felt that much of it was “overwritten” with clumsy imagery and an over-reliance on flowery adjectives. We all agreed that the novel was too long, and that the shifts between the two plot threads were too frequent; some sections were just a few pages long and this prevented real involvement with the characters. Whilst Doerr frequently evoked Marie-Laure’s blindness and how she coped with it, we felt that some of the action involving her was just not credible. We also felt that the American English jarred with the French/German setting; it is a pity that the publishers did not “localise” the text before publication in the UK.

In summary, we were mostly disappointed with a book that had received such acclaim, and none of us is likely to try other works by Doerr.

What does the title mean?The author explains in his own words: "The title is a reference first and foremost to all the light we literally cannot see: that is, the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that are beyond the ability of human eyes to detect (radio waves, of course, being the most relevant). It’s also a metaphorical suggestion that there are countless invisible stories still buried within World War II — that stories of ordinary children, for example, are a kind of light we do not typically see. Ultimately, the title is intended as a suggestion that we spend too much time focused on only a small slice of the spectrum of possibility." - Anthony Doerr