100 Books That Defined the Decade

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014)

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

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Essential stats: Doerr’s insanely popular WWII novel, about a blind French teenager and a German soldier whose paths collide in occupied France, spent an unheard of 130 consecutive weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. It also bagged the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a National Book Award finalist. After 56 printings of the hardcover edition, there are now more than 4 million copies of All the Light We Cannot See in circulation across all formats in North America alone.

So people liked it then. Many, many, many people, yes. Though some took issue with its sentimental depiction of the Holocaust.

Will they be making a TV adaptation? Duh. Netflix and 21 Laps (the Stranger Things production company) are developing a limited series as we speak.

But will you cry? This person did:

–DS