All the Light We Cannot See

Paris and Germany, 1930s–1944. Marie-Laure LeBlanc loses her sight as a child, and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History, teaches her to navigate by building intricate models of their neighbourhood. When German forces occupy Paris, they flee with a secret connected to the museum’s collection and take refuge in the fortified Breton town of Saint-Malo. Meanwhile, Werner Pfennig, an orphaned German boy with an exceptional gift for radio engineering, is drawn from a mining settlement into an elite Nazi school and then into a military unit that locates illicit broadcasts.

As Marie-Laure’s great-uncle uses his radio to transmit information for the French Resistance, Werner becomes increasingly troubled by the human consequences of the work he has been trained to perform. Their separate journeys converge during the Allied bombardment of Saint-Malo, where hidden messages, a hunted gemstone and the fragile possibility of moral choice bind together civilians, occupiers and resisters caught inside the machinery of war.