Avez-vous jamais lu un livre capable de vous transporter dans d'autres mondes et à d'autres époques, si fascinant que la seule chose qui compte est de continuer à en tourner les pages ? Le roman d'Anthony Doerr nous entraîne de la Constantinople du XVe siècle jusqu'à un futur lointain où l'humanité joue sa survie à bord d'un étrange vaisseau spatial, en passant par l'Amérique des années 1950 à nos jours. Ses personnages ont vu leur destin bouleversé par La Cité des nuages et des oiseaux, un mystérieux texte de la Grèce antique qui célèbre le pouvoir de l'écrit et de l'imaginaire. Et si seule la littérature pouvait nous sauver ?
Anthony Doerr érige une éblouissante cathédrale de papier, un monument de l'imaginaire, immense et fabuleux, en l'honneur de la littérature. Le Parisien Week-end.
Une plume riche, imagée, prompte à célébrer la beauté et la complexité du monde. La Croix.
Traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Marina Boraso.
Toute la lumière que nous ne pouvons voir possède la puissance et le souffle des chefs-d'oeuvre. Magnifiquement écrit, captivant de bout en bout, il nous entraîne, du Paris de l'Occupation à l'effervescence de la Libération, dans le sillage de deux héros dont l'existence est bouleversée par la guerre : Marie-Laure, une jeune aveugle, réfugiée avec son père à Saint-Malo, et Werner, un orphelin, véritable génie des transmissions électromagnétiques, dont les talents sont exploités par la Wehrmacht pour briser la Résistance.
Cette fresque envoûtante, bien plus qu'un roman sur la guerre, est une réflexion profonde sur le destin et la condition humaine. La preuve que même les heures les plus sombres ne pourront jamais détruire la beauté du monde.
Un écrivain électrique qui défie les ténèbres, rallume la lumière avec les mots. Philippe Chevilley, Les Echos.
Un livre rare. Julien Bisson, Lire.
Un éblouissant tour de force. Alexandre Fillon, Livres hebdo.
A GUARDIAN BEST FICTION PICK OF 2021 ''Serious novels are rarely this fun'' The Times ''A gift'' Guardian ''Buoyant with humanity'' Daily Mail ''Worth the seven year wait'' Stylist When everything is lost, it''s our stories that survive How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.
Constantinople, 1453: An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.
Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that''s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?
Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.
Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See , Anthony Doerr''s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious 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.
De l'Afrique du Sud à la Lituanie, de l'Allemagne nazie à la banlieue de Cleveland, les six nouvelles d'Anthony Doerr proposent un voyage troublant dans l'espace et à travers le temps. Le temps de la mémoire qui relie, comme un fil fragile, les personnages, tous hantés par la perte ou la résurgence de leur passé et confrontés à ce manque vertigineux de ce qui a été mais n'est plus. À l'image d'Alma, une veuve septuagénaire de Cape Town, à qui l'on tente curieusement de voler ses plus précieux souvenirs, dans la magnifique nouvelle qui donne son titre au recueil.
L'écriture vivante, séquencée, cache bien la sophistication du style magistral d'Anthony Doerr.
Liliane Kerjan, La Quinzaine littéraire.
« Ces nouvelles éclairent très subtilement les liens fragiles qui relient notre présent et notre passé, en montrant à quel point nos destins sont façonnés par la mémoire. » André Clavel, Lire.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious 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 Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'' For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth. In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
À cinquante-neuf ans, David Winckler n'est plus que l'ombre de lui-même. Dans une autre vie, il fut un mari, le père d'une petite fille, et surtout un hydrologue passionné. Après des années d'exil sous le soleil des Caraïbes, il décide d'entreprendre une longue odyssée à la recherche de souvenirs enfouis et d'un avenir incertain. Il ignore encore que, dans l'avion qui le ramène à Cleveland, l'at-tendent les fantômes de sa vie antérieure... Anthony Doerr signe un premier roman lumineux et lyrique qui confirme l'originalité de son univers et la singulière beauté de sa prose.
« Anthony Doerr sait restituer les qualités à la fois destructrices et inspiratrices de la nature : les craquements de la glace en hiver, la neige qui tombe comme une rafale d'étoiles, des cieux hallucinatoires. À propos de Grace est un remarquable roman. » The Times Literary Supplement « Anthony Doerr revisite le territoire qu'il a défini dans son superbe recueil de nouvelles, Le Nom des coquillages : la fascination pour le monde naturel, la mesure des hommes face aux forces naturelles, le tout porté par une écriture qui fait littéralement vibrer chaque page. » The New York Times
Des côtes du Kenya aux banlieues de l'Ohio, des forêts du Montana à une petite ville de l'Idaho, Le Nom des coquillages explore l'étroite frontière entre le monde naturel et celui des hommes. Avec un réel talent de conteur, Anthony Doerr capte l'essence du monde visible mais aussi les paysages intérieurs de ses personnages.
Une écriture éblouissante et un talent poétique indéniable : à 28 ans, ce jeune écrivain fait une entrée remarquée sur la scène littéraire. Ce premier recueil de nouvelles, salué aux États-Unis par une presse unanime, nous laisse entendre une musique éternelle : la rude symphonie du monde vivant.
« Anthony Doerr est un merveilleux écrivain. Ses nouvelles, tout en profondeur, nous font retrouver des endroits oubliés et découvrir de nouvelles contrées. Elles ne se contentent pas de témoigner de la beauté, elles aident à la créer. » Rick Bass
The showstopping debut from the author of the #1 Sunday Times bestseller ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE A blind man spends his days roaming the beaches of Kenya collecting shells, classifying them by feeling their whorls, spines and folds in his fingers. A young woman discovers that she can explore the inner world of an animal''s mind by touching its freshly dead body. A refugee from Liberia, who cannot escape the horrors that he has witnessed, finds salvation in the clandesitne act of burying the hearts of beached whales. In The Shell Collector Antony Doerr illuminates both the riotous dangers of the natural world and the rocky terrain of the human heart.
Beautifully written and compelling, About Grace is the brilliant debut novel from Anthony Doerr. Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine, he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family''s home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into his reach. Then, as unstoppable as a vision, he falls in love, at the supermarket (exactly as he already dreamed) with Sandy. They flee south, landing in Ohio, where their daughter Grace is born. And then the visions of Grace''s death begin for Winkler, as their waterside home is inundated. Plagued by the same horrific images of Grace drowning, when the floods come, he cannot face his destiny and flees. He beaches on a remote Caribbean island, where he works as a handyman, chipping away at his doubts and hopes, never knowing whether Grace survived the flood or met the doom he foretold. After two decades, he musters the strength to find out...
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious 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.
On the same day that his wife gave birth to twins, Anthony Doerr received the Rome Prize, an award that gave him a year-long stipend and studio in Rome... ''Four Seasons in Rome'' charts the repercussions of that day, describing Doerr''s varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world, and the first year of parenthood. He reads Pliny, Dante, and Keats - the chroniclers of Rome who came before him - and visits the piazzas, temples, and ancient cisterns they describe. He attends the vigil of a dying Pope John Paul II and takes his twins to the Pantheon in December to wait for snow to fall through the oculus. He and his family are embraced by the butchers, grocers, and bakers of the neighbourhood, whose clamour of stories and idiosyncratic child-rearing advice is as compelling as the city itself. This intimate and revelatory book is a celebration of Rome, a wondrous look at new parenthood and a fascinating account of the alchemy of writers.
