All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

You wonder whether there can be yet another perspective on either of the world wars but yes, Anthony Doerr has done it. This book involves one of those backwards/forwards structures, where you move between the experiences of the two main protagonists and one more minor character, and backwards and forwards in time as well. Yet it’s not confusing. It tells the story of WWII from the point of view of a young and sensitive German boy, Werner, who is picked out of an orphanage because of his genius for radio technology and sent off to a Hitler Youth school to prepare for war. It follows him to St Malo and charts his failure to stand up against what he knows is inhumane in the face of the fanatics behind the Nazi war machine until his redemption, which you know has to be coming, in the end. It must have been something countless Germans had to deal with as the war progressed. And it’s a question I’ve long been interested in – what would I do in the face of relentless propaganda and the danger of resisting authority. Would I buckle or be brave? The other protagonist is a blind French girl Marie Laure, daughter of a museum locksmith, who flees Paris with her father carrying one of the museum’s greatest treasures, a blue diamond. The diamond and the quest of the third protagonist, a Nazi sergeant major, to obtain it provide another form of conflict and suspense in the book, though I think the internal conflict suffered by Werner is far more interesting. The language in this book is exquisite. Doerr not only tells a good story but he also expresses it in the most beautiful figurative language, so lovely that I found myself stopping to read passages over again.