Anthony Doerr, winner of four O. Henry prizes, will read from his latest book, "All the Light We Cannot See," at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 16 in Fairfield University's Gonzaga Auditorium. The event, part of Fairfield's Inspired Writer Series, is free and open to the public, but registration is required at www.fairfieldpubliclibrary.org . It is sponsored by The MFA in Creative Writing Program in partnership with the Fairfield Public Library.

Doerr is also the author of "The Shell Collector," "About Grace," "Four Seasons in Rome" and "Memory Wall," and his work has been anthologized in several collections of short stories. He won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes and the 2010 Story Prize, among many other honors.

"All the Light We Cannot See" tells the interwoven tale of Marie-Laure, a young blind girl in Paris, who flees the Nazis with her father and ends up on the Brittany coast, and an orphan German boy, Werner, whose talent with radios wins him a spot in an elite military school and, later, as a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Ten years in the writing, "All the Light We Cannot See" is Doerr's most ambitious work.

It is "a novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned," according to Booklist.

"This novel has the physical and emotional heft of a masterpiece," wrote a reviewer for Library Journal.

Books will be available for sale at the event. For more information, contact Elizabeth Hastings, ehastings@fairfield.edu or (203) 254-4000, ext. 2688.

Posted On: 04-28-2014 03:04 PM

Volume: 46 Number: 280