I guess I’ve always had a terror of erasure, going back to when I was 12 or 13 watching Alzheimer’s devour my grandma’s sense of self, and I found myself wanting to tell a story about the beauty of how culture endures.

When I had a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, it was the first time I’d been around classical scholars, who taught me how few ancient texts actually survive.

You’ve described Cloud Cuckoo Land as a “literary-sci-fi-mystery-young-adult-historical-morality novel”. Doerr, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, spoke to me from his home in Boise, Idaho. His new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, spans medieval Constantinople, a 22nd-century spaceship and a public library held under armed siege by a teenage environmentalist in modern-day America. The story of a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy during the second world war, it is the biggest selling title in the history of its UK publisher, Fourth Estate, home to Jonathan Franzen and Hilary Mantel. Click here to buy it for £7.A nthony Doerr, 47, is the author of six books, including All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2015. However, the story itself is gripping and it is easy to understand why Doerr’s book is regarded by many as an epic and a masterpiece.Īll the Light We Cannot See is published by 4th Estate (£8.99). There are also some strange mistakes: for instance, Niels Bohr was not a German.

There is a worrying even-handedness in Doerr’s treatment of the Germans and the French. And it is a weakness of this book that it has many aspects of genre fiction, despite the huge amount of research that has gone into it. Of course as you read the dual story, you wonder how soon it is before Marie-Laure and Werner are going to meet. Marie-Laure, virtually all alone with her eccentric great uncle now, joins the resistance and carries messages in baguettes. Marie-Laure’s father is investigated and taken away, ending up in a German camp. Life in Saint-Malo becomes increasingly difficult as the Germans take full control. Werner moves closer to the front as the Germans favour experts who can pick up radio transmissions from the allies. Despite her blindness, the girl is able to visualise the layout of the town when her father makes a small and detailed model of it. When the Nazis arrive in Paris and begin to investigate the museum, demanding keys from Marie’s father, he makes plans to move to his uncle’s house in Saint-Malo.

All the light we cannot see book