Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind French girl who lives with her father, a locksmith working at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. Werner Pfennig is an orphan living with his younger sister at a children’s home in the mining town of Zollverein, Germany. The year is 1934. Yet the book opens 10 years later with the thrum of bombers and leaflets falling from the sky. It is the siege of Saint-Malo in August 1944, and both our protagonists await a fate drawn for them in the previous decade. Marie-Laure reads her beloved braille copy of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Werner – a soldier with precocious scientific gifts – listens for the sound of French resistance, or Debussy. What reverberates through the town is not only a belief in chance and physics, but also the power of myth. A precious gem, The Sea of Flames, remains hidden and is reputed to bring eternal protection, or a curse.

It’s against this backdrop of war, and the Führer’s insatiable desire for Europe’s most precious objects, that an epic battle of fairytale and science plays its course. But it’s impossible to do Doerr’s novel any justice with paltry aphorisms. The depth of emotion here is immense. At its core lies the tender connection between siblings and family in a war where even children ask: is it right to do something only because everyone else is doing it?

Luke May is a freelance reviewer.