All the Light We Cannot See

Saint Malo is a walled city on the coast of Brittany, France, on the English Channel. The city’s history dates back to antiquity, and its high walls were first constructed in the 4th century CE, when the city was part of the Roman Empire, as protection against raiders crossing the channel from lands beyond the empire’s frontier. From the early middle ages into the 19th century, Saint-Malo was the home port of the corsairs—French privateers who had state permission to conduct raids on any ships belonging to states at war with France. The line between the corsairs’ legalized plundering and outright piracy was often quite blurry, and corsairs frequently became pirates in times of peace. In this period, Saint-Malo developed a fiercely independent identity, reflected in the city’s motto: Ni Français, ni Breton, Malouin suis—“Neither French, nor Breton, I am Malouin.”

When France fell under German occupation during World War II, Saint-Malo’s ancient city walls made it attractive to the occupiers as a fortress—part of the “Atlantic Wall” program by which Germany intended to defend its captured European territory against invasions from the sea. Saint-Malo was the last German position on the European mainland to surrender to Allied forces. After the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, Allied forces heavily bombarded Saint-Malo, and the US Army led a siege against the German-occupied city that led to its surrender on August 17. These are the events depicted in the novel, as Marie-Laure LeBlanc struggles to stay alive in a heavily damaged house in the center of town, and as Werner Pfennig finds his courage and his humanity to rescue her. The French Resistance had many members in the Brittany region, concentrated in the towns of Saint-Malo, Dinard, and Dinan, and their courageous efforts were instrumental in weakening German forces ahead of the Allied invasion. This historical circumstance is reflected in the novel in the activities of Madame Manec and the Old Ladies’ Resistance Club.