Where to start with Anthony Doerr

American novelist, born 1973. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015.

Best Anthony Doerr book to start with: All the Light We Cannot See (2014), on 4 of the 15 lists it could have made.

Most readers come to Doerr through All the Light We Cannot See, and it is the right place to begin. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Award. It follows a blind French girl and a German boy through the Second World War, in very short chapters that make it easy to read in small sittings.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is bigger in ambition and moves between several periods, from the distant past to the future. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2021 and for Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2022. Read it second: it asks you to hold more threads at once, and you will enjoy it more if you have already got used to the way he builds a book from short chapters.

Anthony Doerr's books, ranked best first

All the Light We Cannot See comes first, on 4 of the 15 lists it could have made, followed by Cloud Cuckoo Land.

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