The story follows two protagonists on opposite sides of the conflict whose lives eventually collide in the walled city of Saint-Malo, France.
- Marie-Laure: A blind French girl who lives in Paris with her father, a master of locks at the Museum of Natural History. When the Nazis occupy Paris, they flee to Saint-Malo, carrying with them what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
- Werner Pfennig: A German orphan with a genius-level talent for fixing radios. This skill earns him a place at a brutal military academy for the Hitler Youth and eventually a position tracking the French Resistance.
The novel is told in short, fast-paced chapters that jump back and forth in time, building toward the moment their paths cross during the Allied bombing of Saint-Malo in 1944.
It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015 and has become a modern classic, loved for its lyrical prose and the way it weaves together the lives of two very different people during World War II.
⭐ Reviews
Entertainment Weekly:“A beautiful, expansive exhibition of masterly storytelling. It’s a book that manages to be both a gripping thriller and a profound meditation on the power of radio, the resilience of the human spirit, and the ‘light’—the goodness—that we cannot always see.”
The New York Times:“A novel to live in, learn from, and feel ennobled by… Doerr’s writing is incandescent. He captures the sights and sounds of the war with a precision that makes the familiar feel entirely new.”