All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize last year. If that’s not enough for you, here are four (other) reasons to read it:

1. The cast of characters

The two main characters are a blind French girl named Marie-Laure and Werner, a German boy who is scooped up by the Nazis and placed in a paramilitary college. The war means that both children need to exercise adult sensibilities and make adult decisions; throughout the novel, the protagonists’ innocence continuously knocks against the demands that war makes of them.