Anthony Doerr · 2014 · overland

Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer-winning 2014 novel, braiding the stories of a blind French girl and a German orphan with a gift for radios through the Second World War, until their paths cross in the besieged walled city of Saint-Malo. Luminous and humane about innocence and complicity. The route braids two threads: Werner's road from a German mining town through a brutal Nazi school, and Marie-Laure's flight from Paris, converging on the Breton coast.

1. 1
   Zollverein

   In the coal town of Zollverein, the orphan Werner teaches himself radios, a talent that will lift him out of the mines and into the war machine.

2. 2
   Schulpforta

   He is taken to the brutal Nazi academy at Schulpforta, where cruelty is the curriculum and his gift is turned to hunting the enemy's broadcasts.

3. 3
   Paris

   Meanwhile in Paris the blind girl Marie-Laure and her locksmith father flee the German invasion, carrying a fabled and cursed diamond.

4. 4
   Saint-Malo

   Both are drawn to the walled city of Saint-Malo, where in the firestorm of the 1944 siege their two lives briefly, indelibly touch.