If you’re looking for a good story set during the Second World War, this is the book for you. All The Light We Cannot See follows the lives of two children growing up during the 1930s and 40s, both before and during the war. The story switches between France and Germany, and we gain an insight into what it was like to grow up in these countries in the run up to the war.
Walter is an orphan living with his sister in Hitler’s Germany. Their father was crushed in a mining accident, and Walter will most likely be doomed to enter the pits himself, as there were few other opportunities for a boy of his background during the throes of Germany’s economic depression. However, Walter has a talent for mending radios that earns him a place at an elite boarding school preparing boys for entry into the Wehrmacht, which changes his future for ever.
Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her beloved father, a locksmith at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. Marie-Laure starts to go blind from cataracts when she is only six years old, so her devoted father builds her a small-scale model of the city, so she can memorise its streets and find her way around by touch and memory as she grows up.
Throughout the book the lives of these two children draw closer and closer, and you cannot help but wonder if and when their paths will cross.
All The Light We Cannot See gently explores what it meant to be an ordinary person caught up in the political turmoil of the early 20th century. The gift of novels is that they are able to tell us far more about the feeling at the time than any history books are able to convey. It is far too easy, with the gift of hindsight, to wonder why people did what they did during this time. Yet All The Light We Cannot See reminds us what it is to be human, caught in a web of choice, survival and destiny.
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