Hence, his wish to write something revolving around this miracle. 'And I just remember thinking, what he's forgetting-really what we're all forgetting all the time-is that this is a miracle,' Doerr told NPR. The idea for the novel came to Doerr through the anger of a subway commuter over a dropped call.
Fate brings him to Saint-Malo and Marie-Laure, even as the town is threatened by a real sea of flames from the war raging around them. He was eventually forced to join the German army and is placed in a squad tracking illegal enemy radio signals. These broadcasts filled the days of German boy Werner Pfennig, who developed a knack for fixing radios. When Germany invades France in 1940, father and daughter seek refuge at the coastal town of Saint-Malo with her great-uncle Etienne, a shell-shocked World War I veteran who spends his days broadcasting educational audio recordings via radio. What Marie-Laure doesn't know is that her dad is also the custodian of a diamond dubbed the Sea of Flames.
No, it's not Titanic but All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.ĭaniel LeBlanc, the master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris in the 1930s, creates a miniature of the city to help his blind daughter Marie-Laure to navigate it.