All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

 

Blinded at six years by a disease, Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris.  He is the lockmaster at the Museum Of Natural History where he overseas thousands of locks.  To give Marie some independence, he makes an exact model of the blocks between their apartment and the museum so that she can study it and eventually make her own way around her home.  But this is the 1940's and Paris is not safe.  The Germans will soon occupy it so Marie and her father make their way to a small French town on the coast where his uncle lives.  Etienne has not left his house in several decades, afraid of the things he sees after his own war experience. 

Werner is a German orphan, living with his sister in a home in a mining town in Germany.  He knows that he will be sent underground at age fifteen to the same mines that killed his father.  But Werner is brilliant, able to repair almost anything mechanical and especially radios.  His aptitude is noted and he is sent to one of the premier schools in Germany and then finally to the front where his job is to locate the transmitters of the Resistance so that they can be stopped and those who risk their lives to exchange information imprisoned or killed.  At last they come to the same town where Marie-Laure and Etienne live.  They have become part of the Resistance and their broadcasts are the ones the Germans most want to stop.

By now, the war is almost over and the Americans are about to take back the town.  This means that the town becomes a battlefield.  The two meet when the battle is over and Werner helps Marie to escape the town.  She shows him her secrets, including the diamond that her father had been trusted to leave the museum with to preserve it from capture.  

This book won the Pulitzer Prize and was a National Book Award finalist.  Doerr tells the story of these two individuals forever marked by the war in alternating chapters.  The reader sees the tragedy of war through the lives of Marie and Warner and the love that sustains even in wartime.  This book is recommended for readers of historical and literary fiction.