“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever” –– Anthony Doerr
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I recently had a beautiful exchange with a lady in the bookshop.
Lost in my own space, I am gazing at the Staff Picks shelf and pondering who might have similar tastes to mine when the woman beside me recommends a book. I listen as I pick it up and it does indeed sound wonderful.
“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.”
“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”
“I’m looking for a new one”, the woman says. I take her over to the shelf where my favourite novel, Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’, sits and she says thank you.
I hope she reads it as I will fondly the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘All The Light We Cannot See‘ that she recommended to me.
Let’s now find time to reflect on all the light we cannot see.
Find out more ☞ anthonydoerr.com
• HIRETH • 