# Read the first page of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr Read the opening of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr free, no signup. A blind French girl and a German soldier cross paths in occupied France. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/all-the-light-we-cannot-see-anthony-doerr - Genre: Historical literary fiction - Year: 2014 - ISBN: 9781501173219 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781501173219&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781501173219 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781501173219 ## The opening At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country. The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars. They cross the Channel at midnight. There are twelve and they are named for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin' Mama. The sea glides along far below, spattered with the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon. France. Intercoms crackle. Deliberately, almost lazily, the bombers shed altitude. Threads of red light ascend from anti-air emplacements up and down the coast. Dark, ruined ships appear, scuttled or destroyed, one with its bow shorn away, a second flickering as it burns. On an outermost island, panicked sheep run zigzagging between rocks. Inside each airplane, a bombardier peers through an aiming window and counts to twenty. Four five six seven. To the bombardiers, the walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away. In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue Vauborel, on the sixth and highest floor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model. The model is a miniature of the city she kneels within, and contains scale replicas of the hundreds of houses and shops and hotels within its walls. There’s the cathedral with its perforated spire, and the bulky old Château de Saint-Malo, and row after row of seaside mansions studded with chimneys. A slender wooden jetty arcs out from a beach called the Plage du Môle; a delicate, reticulated atrium vaults over the seafood market; minute benches, the smallest no larger than apple seeds, dot the tiny public squares. Marie-Laure runs her fingers along the centimeter-wide parapet crowning the ramparts, drawing an uneven star shape around the entire model. She finds the opening atop the walls where four ceremonial cannons point to sea. “Bastion de la Hollande,” she whispers, and her fingers walk down a little staircase. “Rue des Cordiers. Rue Jacques Cartier.” In a corner of the room stand two galvanized buckets filled to the rim with water. Fill them up, her great-uncle has taught her, whenever you can. The bathtub on the third floor too. Who knows when the water will go out again. Her fingers travel back to the cathedral spire. South to the Gate of Dinan. All evening she has been marching her fingers around the model, waiting for her great-uncle Etienne, who owns this house, who went out the previous night while she slept, and who has not returned. And now it is night again, another revolution of the clock, and the whole block is quiet, and she cannot sleep. ## Books with a similar feel - [Pachinko by Min Jin Lee](https://uncovered.ink/read/pachinko-min-jin-lee.md) - [Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi](https://uncovered.ink/read/homegoing-yaa-gyasi.md) - [The Room on Rue Amelie by Kristin Harmel](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-room-on-rue-amelie-kristin-harmel.md) - [La Belle Famille by Amelia Maria Vergara](https://uncovered.ink/read/la-belle-famille-amelia-maria-vergara.md) - [The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-welsh-girl-peter-ho-davies.md) - [Barkskins by Annie Proulx](https://uncovered.ink/read/barkskins-annie-proulx.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.