The primary setting for this text is Saint-Malo, France. Although this is not the hometown of either of the two protagonists, the characters have ended up here as a direct result of the war and without any real input in the decisions which lead them here.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is raised in Paris, France, a city known as a rich cultural and historical hub. This adds a dimension to the novel and reinforces the LeBlanc family as symbolic of art, culture and history. Daniel LeBlanc, Marie-Laure’s father, is the principal locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History. Marie-Laure spends much of her time at the museum and is interested in the artefacts and information she finds there. Daniel is ‘continually placing some unexpected thing into her hands: a lightbulb, a fossilised fish, a flamingo feather’. Paris is a place of wonder until the news and rumours start that the Germans are coming.

Doerr creates a ‘paradise lost’ as the museum begins to hide and send away artefacts. People are flooding to the station to flee. Marie-Laure is plucked from her childhood home by her father and forced to walk until her heels bleed in her stockings. First they walk to Evreux where they were to meet François Giannot, a man referred to Daniel by the museum, however François has fled to London and his house has been burned and ransacked, so they make their way to relatives of Daniel in Saint-Malo.

Werner is raised in an orphanage three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein, a four thousand-acre coal-mining complex outside Essen, Germany. Raised with his sister, Jutta, by a French-born matron, Frau Elena, the orphanage is described as ‘populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents’. The town is bleak and the mine and its machinery are ever-present. Werner desires to escape the town before he is sent to the mines when he turns 15 as part of a mandatory work program.

Werner’s home town is representative of the German plight at the time. Mines are working to repay other nations as reparation from WWI. To the new generation this seems like a burden they did not deserve. It was this fertile unrest that allowed Hitler to spread seeds of a brighter future through war. It is a promise of a brighter future that leads Werner to Schulpforta, a school for gifted German youth. From here, as the war progresses and the Germans need troops, he is called up to serve with a radio location unit. This will lead him to Saint-Malo.

Saint-Malo was a sleepy walled town on the coast of France until the war came. Strategic in its position, it had once been the site of a ferocious battle when the town served as a stronghold for 17th-century privateers and maritime warriors. Now forgotten by history, it has a pivotal role towards the end of the war. The historical anonymity of the town lends itself to the title as a piece of light that we cannot see. Although it had stood the test of time, it will not survive the bombings of WWII. On a side note, after the town is reduced to rubble by the bombs, the townspeople rebuild the city stone by stone over a period of 12 years. Perhaps Doerr was mindful of this when he chose the town as the setting, having visited the rebuilt version while on a tour of France. This restoration is symbolic of life after war, like Marie-Laure and Jutta rebuilding their lives, a new generation.

Marie-Laure lives in a ‘tall, derelict bird’s nest of a house’ that belongs to her great uncle, Etienne. It is new, as is the town, and she needs a new model to help her access the outside world. Her willingness to explore the beach and to eventually run errands for the French Resistance in that town exemplify her courage and tenacity.

Werner’s unit takes up residence in L’hôtel des Abeilles, the Hotel of Bees. A former luxurious hotel that ‘was a cheerful address, with bright blue shutters on its façade and oysters on ice in its café’, the hotel is now home to an Austrian artillery unit. The parallels between the bees and the German forces are laid out. The large gun is the queen, ‘Her Majesty, the Austrians call their cannon, and for the past week these men have tended to it the way worker bees might tend to a queen.’ Busy drones are like Werner buzzing throughout the hotel. This metaphor is highlighted by Marie-Laure’s question about the bees that she hears when sitting still. ‘How do they know what parts to play, those little bees?’

The protagonists’ residences in the final scenes at Saint-Malo hint at the characters’ profiles. Marie-Laure is up high in the attic of a chateau that has stood resiliently amongst the bombs. Werner is in a basement, in the dark, his radio broken. Both of them are trapped and in need of each other, Werner to help them escape physically and Marie-Laure to help him escape his ‘duty’.