A blind French girl and a young Nazi set off on a collision course
Harrowing and heart-lifting by turns, Anthony Doerr’s masterful new novel gives history a human face and finds intimacy amid the chaos of war. In the wake of D-Day, Allied forces lay siege to Nazi-held Saint-Malo, 100 miles from the Normandy beaches. Trapped among the scattered survivors is 18-year-old Werner, a Nazi hunter of Resistance fighters. On the other side of the city is 16-year-old Marie-Laure, a blind girl who escaped Paris with her father at the beginning of the occupation. When they fled to Saint-Malo, her father, a locksmith and keeper of the keys at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, smuggled a rare diamond with a dark secret. With bombs falling all around them, the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner ultimately collide. The story is told with meticulous attention to detail, and you find yourself turning the pages, desperate to discover what happens next.
