All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure curls into a ball beneath her bed with the stone in her left fist and the little house in her right. Nails in the timbers shriek and sigh. Bits of plaster and brick and glass cascade onto the floor, onto the model city on the table, and onto the mattress above her head. “Papa Papa Papa Papa,” Marie-Laure is saying, but her body seems to have detached itself from her voice, and her words make a faraway, desolate cadence. The notion occurs to her that the ground beneath Saint-Malo has been knitted together all along by the root structure of an immense tree, located at the center of the city, in a square no one ever walked her to, and the massive tree has been uprooted by the hand of God and the granite is coming with it, heaps and clumps and clods of stones pulling away as the trunk comes up, followed by the fat tendrils of roots—the root structure like another tree turned upside down and shoved into the soil, isn’t that how Dr. Geffard might have described it?—the ramparts crumbling, streets leaking away, block-long mansions falling like toys.