Light Between Oceans The

A captivating beautiful and stunningly accomplished debut novel - the story of a lighthouse keeper and his wife who make one devastating choice that forever changes two worlds. In 1918 after four harrowing years on the Western Front Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock. To this isolated island where the supply boat comes only four times a year and shore leaves are granted every other year at best Tom brings a young bold and loving wife Isabel. Three years later after two miscarriages and one stillbirth the grieving Isabel is tending the grave of her newly lost infant when she hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up on shore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war wants to report the dead man and the infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom’s judgment they claim the child as their own and name her Lucy but a rift begins to grow between them. When Lucy is two Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world…and one of them is desperate to find her lost baby.M.L. Stedman’s extraordinarily compelling characters still trying to make sense of life in the wake of so much death in the war are imperfect people seeking to find their north star in a world of incomprehensible complexity.