Author Story
Author story continued
All the Light We Cannot See was published in May of 2014 to positive critical reviews but little fanfare. It made it onto the NY Times Bestseller list, gradually creeping up the list over the next several months. Last fall, the book was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Notoriety started to pick up, mostly through word-of-mouth, but also by winning a myriad of end-of-the-year best book awards. Finally, early in 2015, All the Light We Cannot See ascended to the NY Times top spot for three weeks. Currently, it has been on the list for 48 straight weeks, and remains one of the most popular circulating books in our library!
About the book: All the Light We Cannot See was called “hauntingly beautiful” by the New York Times. The novel follows a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Deftly interweaving their lives, Doerr illuminates the ways that, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).
Anthony Doerr is an American fiction writer, born in 1973 in Ohio. He is the award-winning author of The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, Memory Wall, and the novel All the Light We Cannot See. He was a 2014 National Book Award Finalist. Doerr’s fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in several prestigious anthologies. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, three Ohioana Book Awards, the 2010 Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories, and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which is the largest prize in the world for a single short story. His books have twice been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, and made lots of other year-end “Best Of” lists. In 2007, the British literary magazine, Granta, placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists. (Bowker Author Biography). And now Doerr has won the 2015 Pulitzer Award for Fiction.
