All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer

During the final days of World War II, a courageous blind girl lives in the beautiful coastal town of St. Malo in German-occupied France. She and her father share a valuable and dangerous secret, for which a resourceful and relentless Nazi officer is searching. A reluctant young German boy with a talent for radio engineering has also been sent to St. Malo to track down groups of French resistance fighters by monitoring their transmissions. The leader of the local resistance is an elderly housekeeper, working for the blind girl’s uncle. The characters in this book are beautifully drawn, the atmosphere is so finely rendered that you feel that you are part of the story, and the suspense propels you from one page to the next at a brisk pace. Doerr’s use of language is unusual and exquisite. I read quite a bit, and this is the best new novel I have read in many years.