How long does it take to read All the Light We Cannot See?
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr takes about 9 hours 58 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 58 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2014. 544 pages, about 149,600 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 37 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 58 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 14 minutes |
The page count is the median across 72 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about 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. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work
Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
- violence
- death of a child
- abuse
- war
Subjects: Blind, FICTION / General, Fiction, Youth, FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Historical
