However, for me, the book was not without its problems. Above all there is a feelgood element to this book - Marie-Laure and Werner are good people with the innocence of youth on their side and even the atrocities of war do not manage to corrupt or disillusion them. The book, although long, is broken up into very short chapters which makes it more manageable. The storyline has a lot of potential and is well thought out. As a reader, I felt I knew them quite well by the end of the book and I enjoyed their company. The two main characters, and indeed many of the eclectic supporting cast, are very well developed. Inevitably the book is leading up to a meeting of the ways of the two main characters and that journey is told in this book. The story jumps backwards and forwards through time frames and is also told from the Points of View of both Marie-Laure and Werner. As the war progresses, Marie-Laure and her father flee to the relative safety of St Malo to live with a reclusive Uncle and Werner is recruited by the Nazis to a unit responsible for tracking down and destroying resistance radio operators. Werner has a natural flare for engineering and becomes particularly fascinated by radios and their inner workings. Meanwhile Werner and his sister are growing up in an orphanage in Germany. He works at the Natural History Museum and she accompanies him to work most days and becomes fascinated by the stories that are held there. She is blind and relies on her loving father for everything. Marie-Laure is a 12-year old girl living in Paris as the Nazis are about to invade. In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories ofMarie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTIONĪ beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II `Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.’ For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. Buy this book from .uk to support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no additional cost to you
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