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  • All the Light We Cannot See

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Anthony Doerr
  • Narrated by: Zach Appelman
  • Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (934 ratings)

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All the Light We Cannot See cover art

All the Light We Cannot See

Written by: Anthony Doerr
Narrated by: Zach Appelman
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Publisher's Summary


All the Light We Cannot See traces the stories of three main characters whose lives intersect during the WWII bombing of the German-occupied French town of Saint-Malo in August 1944.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is an intimate and personal story of a French girl and a German boy who are drawn together while trying to keep out of the reach of Nazis during the devastation of World War II and French Resistance.

Marie-Laure Leblanc lives in Paris, France, where her father, Daniel Leblanc, works as a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. As a young girl, Marie-Laure loses her eyesight but not her independence. Her father builds a miniature model of her neighbourhood so she can learn by touch and navigate her way home. In June 1940, when she was 12 years old, the threat of German occupation grew too great to ignore. Marie-Laure and Daniel flee from Paris to Saint-Malo, where they move in with her great-uncle, Etienne, and his housekeeper, Madame Manec. It is there that their paths cross with Werner Pfennig.

An orphan, Werner lives in Germany with his younger sister, Jutta. After becoming enchanted by a crude radio they find, Werner develops a knack for building and fixing these vital new communication instruments. His skill wins him a place at the academy for Hitler Youth–but his heart rebels at the brutality. He winds up in Saint-Malo, where he meets a blind girl and her father, who carry the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel - the Sea of Flames.

All the Light We Cannot See is a New York Times Best Seller, which also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a National Book Award Finalist. The Netflix limited series will be released sometime in 2023, starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and Aria Mia Loberti.

What listeners say about All the Light We Cannot See

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
  • Ben
  • 2018-01-31

Best book, but narration brings it down a bit

I re-read this book on Audible in 2017. I was not as into the narration for, while the narrator is good in English, his French is ATROCIOUS! The story requires someone who can read French. Another idea would be to have two or three voices, since the majority of the story is either Werner or Marie-Laure's voice/thoughts (and then maybe a narrator for the other parts?). I'd still say 4/5 stars, but would recommend the physical book to allow the full imagination needed for a masterpiece of fiction like this. Below is my review of the book itself from my previous review (which I gave 5/5 stars)

This book was one of the best I've ever read, both in terms of fiction or war. And that comes as little surprise.

Anthony Doerr's All the Light we Cannot See was over a decade in the making, so a lot of thought has gone into both the realism of the subject (Second World War Germany and France with large portions of the book dealing with natural science and disabilities) and also the feel or style. Doerr's writing is excellent, I felt I could understand and feel the thinking parts especially, capturing the mental images created in the confusion and uncertainty of a nation caught up in fanaticism just as much as in the head of a young blind girl.

The short sections do not detract from understanding more of the characters or following them closely, instead it perfectly fulfills what I can only assume was Doerr's goal: of linking and intertwining the two, sometimes three, occasionally four points of view together. It worked flawlessly in my mind and I never felt like it took anything away from one character.

This hints at, what I believe, is the actual point of the book. The paperback edition's back cover descriptor is a bit misleading as it describes the story as one that "illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another." In my mind, this isn't what the book is about, and while there are definitely many examples of this throughout the narrative (especially from Werner), I would suggest that the moral does not translate in all the characters. Marie-Laure herself doesn't show any propensity to going out of her way to do good for others, she just leads the life presented in front of her. She is good to Madame Manec for sure, but there's no surprise there, and to her uncle in his agoraphobia, but in many ways she would not survive without taking on more responsibility and she wants to help the resistance cause just so she is not cooped up in the house all the time. She does not save Werner (knowingly), but in the same way she could not really do him any harm in the brief time they are together. Most relationships are simply familiar, and I'd argue Werner's friendships are because of a lack of family.

I would suggest that instead of a moral about being good, this book demonstrates the often-described way that timelines and lives get intertwined in wars, brought together in seemingly unexplainable ways with life-altering impacts. Many books touch on this concept, drawing characters together from diverse backgrounds, conveniently placing soul mates together when one needs saving, or having death arrive at tragic moments - all very real situations in our romantic notions of times of conflict - but none do it all too convincingly while really showing how deep those interconnecting points can run. In All the Light we Cannot See those interconnecting lines begin in childhood with Werner and his sister listening to a radio and end 30 years or more after the war with two characters coming together for the first (and only) time. [I'm being vague here in an attempt not to have spoilers!] There are multiple connections, multiple levels of interconnectedness with multiple characters, and Doerr does not shy away from the fact that not all of these are positive, happy, life-affirming connections. Many are hard, trying to piece together lives cut short or finding out what you didn't know about someone you thought you knew. And it is done in a beautiful way where you know it is happening, you know it is coming, you make the connections yourself, but it doesn't effect how you feel about the story.

There are very few criticisms I can have with this book. There were only two things that I noticed as ripples in my pond of happiness about this book. First, characters come and go in the story, just fading into nothing. This is SO WELL DONE, and is so true - people disappear in times of war and are never seen from again, it happens, people die, people live on without them - but Doerr does not always explain these major characters' deaths or show them (except in one instance). It's not necessarily a bad thing - it would change the feel of the story especially in the sections written in Marie-Laure's perspective - but I couldn't help but think either the character served their point and were not brought back, or that the tragedy of their deaths was not felt. Some characters have major connections with the deceased, and we see some references to their feelings of loss, but I suppose it just didn't hit me as I'd expected. Most of the deaths - in fact none of them - really surprised me or came unexpected, even if I did want them (one in particular) to live. The deaths make complete literary sense and I wasn't even that sad about their passing or how they passed, in fact one major character's exit, though unexpected as to how he dies, was beautiful in its tragic simplicity and timing.

The second thing that stuck in my mind was the final section, the standalone chapter in 2014 (a jump of 40 years since the previous chapter). I didn't feel it was needed. It serves a purpose only of reminding the reader of the stone with magical properties, a plot line that seemed to have taken a secondary level of importance once the story brought the protagonists together, and reinforcing those properties both of long life and tragedy for the person holding it (written about in the book) and of it connecting people together (the moral, not written about as a property). But...it was inherent in the story, it didn't need repeating. We've already seen that life goes on and that new life begins. We are well aware of the loss of memory of the war. To me the final chapter seemed to hammer home a sad happy ending just a little too much, and it could simply be that it felt disconnected from the rest of the book or that it brought it too close to current day for it to feel like a story removed from my life. Small points, as the whole book was well done.

I was very happy to see a book, especially one about war, that had a disabled lead character but that doesn't use the disability as a crutch or superpower. I don't think the book would have worked without her being blind, there was a poetry in that connection to Werner and the audible connection of radio, but the book wasn't about her being blind. Her blindness, in the end, seemed no different than Werner's technical expertise, or Volkheimer's size, or von Rumpel's rather mysterious cancerous growth that keeps getting mentioned. It seems much less of a hinderance than Ettiene's paranoia.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Not sure why this is so highly rated?

Not sure if it was the narrator or the story itself but I found my mind wandering on more than one occasion. I didn't connect any of the characters and felt as though the story bounced around too much, also making it hard to stay engaged. No real climax, and a sub-par ending. I wish I could get my 16 hrs and 2 mins back.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Great Story, average narration

Enjoyes the story from start to finish. Good narrator but not the best. Worth listening to.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Captivating

Once in a while a special book comes along. This is one of them. It is the story of a brilliant German boy and a blind French girl whose lives touch briefly during WW2. It is a story of innocence and the destruction of innocence; of compassion and atrocity; of bravery, futility, greed, ingenuity, and everyday lives torn to pieces in a blink of an eye.
It is certainly one of the best audio books I've listened to, and one of the few I will listen to again.
The narration is a little flat, but the reader thankfully makes no attempts to sound like a teenaged boy or girl, or a French woman or German mother. As I listened I found that this style allowed me to make my own interpretations about the story and the characters, much like when I read a book, which was a definite plus.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Slow

The story was good but there’s just too much unnecessary information which makes it very long and hard to engage.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant novel disappointing narration

I read All the Light You Cannot See a few years ago and loved it. The story capturing a part of World War Two from the unique perspectives of Marie-Laure and Werner was riveting.

It was annoying and very disappointing to listen to a book set in France told by a narrator with a terrible French accent - so bad I couldn’t even understand some of the words. It would have been so much better had the narrator been bilingual English-French.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Performance falls flat

Well crafted story arc with compelling characters, however the wooden tone of the narrator flattened my overall enjoyment.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

hard to read

did not like the fact that they were jumping from one time period to another, all through the book

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars

Returned it - Horrible narration

I felt like Charlie Brown. This is absolutely the worzt narration that I've come across. Four chapters in I took zero of the story in. Narration is monotone and dry. I returned it.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars
  • cj
  • 2021-02-20

Worthwhile

Although I struggled with the repetition of some story lines and the subject matter was disheartening, I’m glad I read it. It’s so well written, thoughtful, meaningful. I had to give it a few days to simmer before writing this. The chronology was sometimes confusing I had to rewind to confirm what I’d heard. But when I just sat back closed my eyes and listened, really listened I was there, able to visualise the scenery and characters, this is the sign of an impressive writer. Made my time in pandemic lockdown seem rather minor and more manageable.

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1 person found this helpful