March 9, 2026
This is the second post in “The Research Behind the Story,” a six-part series exploring how award-winning historical fiction writers use travel and on-location research to create the novels we love.
The idea didn’t start in France. It started underground.
In 2004, Anthony Doerr was riding a train from Penn Station to Princeton when the car plunged into a tunnel and a fellow passenger lost his cell signal. The man got, as Doerr later put it, “a little embarrassingly angry, unreasonably angry” — and something about that reaction lodged in Doerr’s mind. He started thinking about what it meant that we take long-distance communication for granted. About a time when hearing a stranger’s voice in a device in your home was genuinely miraculous.
He had the seed of a story: a boy trapped somewhere, a girl reading aloud over the radio. But he didn’t have a place.
A year later, on a book tour in France to promote his novel About Grace, he found one.
Doerr has told this story in multiple interviews, and the details are always vivid. He was walking through Saint-Malo — a walled port city on the coast of Brittany — admiring the granite buildings, the cobblestone lanes, the medieval ramparts overlooking the English Channel. He turned to his editor and said something like, “Look how old this is. This medieval town’s so pretty.”
His editor corrected him. The town had been almost entirely destroyed in August 1944, by American bombs. Of the 865 buildings within the walls, only 182 remained standing after the Battle of Saint-Malo. What Doerr was looking at wasn’t ancient — it was a meticulous reconstruction, rebuilt block by granite block in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Doerr later wrote about being fascinated “that a place could so thoroughly hide its own incineration” — and that his own country was responsible for it.
He started researching the history of Saint-Malo that day. He knew he’d found his setting.
What followed was one of the most committed research processes in recent literary history. Doerr spent a full decade writing All the Light We Cannot See, and much of that time went to research. He traveled to Europe three more times after that initial visit, returning to Saint-Malo, visiting Germany, and exploring Paris. He read wartime diaries and letters. He studied German radio technology and the mechanics of Braille. He learned about the specific radio manufacturers of the era, the layout of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, the number of storm drains in Saint-Malo.
His inability to speak French or German made parts of this difficult — he relied on Google Translate for some materials. But the physical research, the being-there part, was irreplaceable.
When asked in an interview how he researched the period, Doerr said that after his 2005 visit to Saint-Malo, he traveled to Europe three more times, “but mostly [my research] took me into books.” The key word is “mostly.” The books mattered enormously. But they came after the place. The place was the catalyst that gave ten years of desk research its emotional direction.
Read All the Light We Cannot See and you’ll notice something: the physical detail of Saint-Malo isn’t background. It’s structural. The walled city isn’t just where the story happens — its geography shapes everything. The ramparts, the narrow streets, the way sound echoes off stone, the tides that creep into basements at the center of town, the causeway that makes the city feel both connected to and cut off from the rest of France.
Marie-Laure, the novel’s blind protagonist, navigates Saint-Malo through a scale model her father builds for her. The reader navigates it through Doerr’s sensory prose — the smells of salt and seaweed, the texture of cobblestones, the quality of light through ancient (rebuilt) glass.
These aren’t details you get from a history book. They’re details you get from standing on the ramparts yourself and noticing how the wind comes off the Channel, how the granite changes color in different light, how the streets feel underfoot.
One reviewer noted that Doerr “captures its briny smells and moody seas just perfectly.” That precision came from presence.
Here’s what’s remarkable about Saint-Malo as a literary destination: the city is still doing what it did for Doerr. It’s still hiding its own destruction in plain sight. You can walk the ramparts, explore the streets within the walls, eat crêpes in a restaurant that looks centuries old but was built from rubble in 1948, and feel the same uncanny tension between appearance and history that sparked a Pulitzer Prize.
The city has leaned into its literary connection. Doerr was the honored guest of the International Writers House in Saint-Malo in 2015. Someone has even created a walking tour mapped to specific locations in the novel — rue Vauborel, the beaches where Marie-Laure collects snails, the positions where German soldiers were stationed.
But you don’t need a guided tour to understand what Doerr found there. You just need to stand on the walls at low tide, when the barnacled ribs of old shipwrecks emerge from the sand, and feel the weight of a place that has survived three thousand years of sieges — including the one your own country inflicted.
That’s the kind of understanding that doesn’t fit in a Google search.
Doerr’s story isn’t just inspiring — it’s instructive. A few things stand out for any writer planning a research trip:
The discovery was accidental. Doerr wasn’t in Saint-Malo to research a novel. He was on a book tour. The story found him because he was physically present and paying attention. This is one of the strongest arguments for research travel: you don’t always know what you’re looking for until you find it.
The visit came before the deep research. Doerr didn’t spend years reading about Saint-Malo and then go there to confirm what he’d learned. He went there first, felt something, and then spent ten years going deeper. The place set the emotional compass for everything that followed.
He went back. One visit wasn’t enough. He returned to Europe three more times. Research travel isn’t always a single trip — sometimes the first visit raises the questions that the second and third visits answer.
The physical details became the novel’s architecture. Saint-Malo isn’t set dressing in All the Light We Cannot See. The geography of the city — its walls, its tides, its sounds — is woven into the plot, the characters’ experiences, and the novel’s emotional logic. That kind of integration only happens when a writer has internalized a place through their own senses.
If you’re writing a novel set in a specific place and you haven’t been there yet, Doerr’s story is the best case I know for booking the trip. And if you’ve been putting it off because the research feels overwhelming or the logistics seem complicated, that’s exactly the kind of problem a good travel advisor can solve.
Next in the series: “Hiking 25 Miles for a Single Character” — Tracy Chevalier and the art of method research.
Stacy Dillon is the founder of Early & Away Travel Company, where she plans research travel for writers, book clubs, and heritage travelers.]
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