Words leave imprints in your mind like footprints in the sand...
1920s: The most heartbreaking story we’ve read in a long while. Set on a remote outpost of Australia, a lighthouse is the only thing Tom and Isabel know until one day a boat is washed up with a baby and a man inside. The man is dead but the baby is very much alive….
In the (fictional) town of Point Partageuse, Australia during the 1920s, a light house keeper (Tom) and his wife (Isabel) find a life boat with a dead man and live baby in it wash up on their beach.
Isabel has suffered several miscarriages. Life is tough and lonely on Janus Rock. A baby would change things. Who would know if they passed the baby off as their own?
The Light Between Oceans is a novel of anguish, joy, tears and all the other raw emotions you can think of.
It’s what happens when good people make bad decisions.
The lighthouse of Point Partageuse may be fictional but it is the setting, the remote setting of the landscape, the landscape of their grief at not having a baby and the conflicted feelings they have when one day a boat containing a dead man washes ashore –
Alongside the main human characters, however, it was the lighthouse which was perhaps the main protagonist, so vivid in every scene. Before Tom and Isabel go and live together, Tom lives there on his own:
This was a story of everyone’s Janus Rock – that place that we all go to for solitude and the one place that gives us the quiet and loneliness that sometimes we welcome and other times can’t wait to flee. It’s the dark recesses of our mind and conscience.
The Author hails from SW Australia so this is also a port of call when trying to determine the locations even though she has said in an interview that the places just formed in her mind.
The book should ideally be read near a lighthouse set on craggy rocks to get the ultimate booktrail experience.
Susan @thebooktrailer
The story itself will not only touch you but wrench out your heart and your moral compass in several places. ML Stedman creates some VERY difficult scenarios whilst making you feel as if although you might not agree with what they decide to do, you understand in some way.
Battling with your inner conflict is something that we all do at some point but on an issue as important as a child’s future, it takes on a whole new level.
Think of yourself as a 4 year old child when the whole world revolved around your mother and how things were so simple and uncomplicated. Next imagine that little child trapped at the centre of a moral whirlwind and her realisation of her position as she starts to grow up.
The Light Between Oceans made me cry. I had to read it in one day as after leaving my own version of the lighthouse setting, I returned home and read the rest in bed. I noticed it was midnight so I turned out the light.
Seconds later it went back on until I read the last page.
But I was still at that lighthouse on Janus Rock for a long time afterwards.
