The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman: book review

The Light Between Oceans (2012) is set on Janus Rock, an island off the coast of Western Australia, near the mainland’s Point Partageuse, from 1918 to 1950.

Tom Sherbourne is a lighthouse keeper, who moved to Janus Rock in 1918 when he was 28 years old, and married Isabel Graysmark from Point Partageuse, nine years his junior. They are the only residents on the island, supplied with goods about every three months, and shore leave every three years.

On 27 April 1926 – the day of the miracle – a small boat is marooned on Janus Rock – with a dead man and a baby. The Sherbourne’s take the baby girl as their own, whom they call Lucy. The man was Frank Roennfeldt and the two-month-old girl wsa Grace Ellen. Hannah Potts-Roennfeldt is still looking for her husband and child. Eventually the truth is revealed.

The book is written in three parts, in the third person, although Part 3 oscillates between past and present tense, so it is not my favourite section. Having few characters, it is an easy story to follow, the characters are well developed, and the storyline builds slowly to its conclusion. There are some uninteresting themes for me, but I like the themes of loyalty and unbearable choices, of right and wrong and the fine line between them, all of which are nicely woven into the narrative.

[The lighthouse on Janus Rock is fictional.]

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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