All the Light We Cannot See / Anthony Doerr

I may be a sucker for novels set in World War II, so I could not resist picking up All the Light We Cannot See. It follows the fate of two children, one a blind Parisian girl named Marie Laure whose father works in a natural history museum as the keeper of the keys. The other child is Werner, a young orphan living with his sister in the Ruhrgebiet. As the children mature and Hitler’s war machine grinds into gear, their paths eventually cross in the French town of St. Malo. A third strand of the narrative is the legend of a storied diamond, the curse of which seems to shadow Marie Laure’s evacuation from Paris, and eventually brings her and Werner together. Far more compelling than the fate of the diamond is the fascinating story of these two war children and the history that swirls around them.

This was one of those books that will probably rate as an all-time favorite of mine. It was just so good from start to finish.

Similar: Suite Francaise, Sarah’s Key, Atonement, Stones from the River.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

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