All the Light We Cannot See, About Grace and The Shell Collector

‘I can think of very few authors who can put together a sentence with such ecstasy, whose words sing with music and such sheer rapture at what they embody’ The Times



A stunning box set of three beautiful books by Anthony Doerr.




ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE




For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. 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.


In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.




ABOUT GRACE




David Winkler has lived on a remote Caribbean island for more than two decades, after running away from his former life, his wife Sandy and his daughter Grace. David fell in love with Sandy at a supermarket in Alaska ¬ as he dreamt he would. Moving from Alaska to Ohio to escape his fear of the future, they have a child: Grace. But a shadow of fear hangs over David. And when the floods come, he can't face up to the future he has seen for his little girl and leaves both the people he loves. Twenty-five years later, he finally finds the strength to discover his daughter's fate




THE SHELL COLLECTOR




A blind man spends his days roaming the beaches of Kenya collecting shells, classifying them by feeling their whorls, spines and folds in his fingers. A young woman discovers that she can explore the inner world of an animal’s mind by touching its freshly dead body. A refugee from Liberia, who cannot escape the horrors that he has witnessed, finds salvation in the clandesitne act of burying the hearts of beached whales.


In The Shell Collector Antony Doerr illuminates both the riotous dangers of the natural world and the rocky terrain of the human heart.