Brunch recommends Anthony Doerr’s tale of two children connected by radio in war-torn Europe

There are several reasons to pick up All The Light We Cannot See. Here are the wrong ones: It won the Pulitzer for fiction this year, in addition to several other awards. It’s written by Anthony Doerr, who was Granta’s Best Young American Novelist in 2007. It has captivated everyone from Reese Witherspoon to Barack Obama.



We suggest you read it for the story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind girl whose walled French city of Saint-Malo will soon be bombed by Nazis during World War II. Or for Werner Pfennig, the German orphan stuck in a mining town who signs up for the Hitler Youth Academy, tinkering with the radio all along.