As mortar shells rain down on pretty French coastlines, the chestnut trees, river banks and museums of Paris are poisoned with wartime fear. The rumble of advancing military planes fills the cobblestone streets, and blind teenager Marie-Laure LeBlanc and her father, key keeper at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, are forced to flee their city home for a quiet seaside town.

But Monsieur LeBlanc is protecting precious cargo from the grasp of the Nazis, besides his beloved daughter. From the museum he takes into his care an ancient, allegedly cursed and wildly valuable diamond which just so happens to be high on Hitler’s wish list and which a lone devotee is pursuing with rabid determination.

Meanwhile, the life of another young person living over the border is also steered off course by the Second World War. Orphaned engineering prodigy Werner Pfennig’s radio-fixing hobby draws the attention of a local Nazi troop, who enlist his skills for the conflict.  Despite his twin sister’s misgivings about the political situation, Werner is excited to put his passion to use and is too caught up in his spools of wire and the propaganda of war to acknowledge the cruelty he is helping to perpetrate.

The Germans advance through France, seemingly unstoppable. Marie-Laure’s existence of hiding, frightened and hungry is pushed closer and closer to that of Werner’s ever more complex inventions and the increasing violence of those he is working with.

All the Light We Cannot See is Doerr’s fifth novel, and was ten years in the writing. Its short, lyrical chapters give the effect of a complex story made up of poetic sagas, each an episode in this dramatic tale of war and duty, marching its characters towards their fates.