All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

A months-old knot inside Marie-Laure begins to loosen.

Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was

never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong.

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.

A moan shudders through the rubble above them, and in the darkness Werner feels as if he is trapped inside the Nautilus, twenty meters down, while the tentacles of a dozen angry kraken lash its hull. He knows the transmitter must be high in the house. Close to the shelling. He says, “I saved her only to hear her die.

There is pride, too, though—pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daught

See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.

It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

On the table is a stack of paper, on top of which a thick and clumsy spiral has been drawn by a heavy hand.