Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 345 pages
Audiobook Length: 10 hours and 22 minutes
First Published: 2012
View in Goodreads
Buy on Amazon
Publisher’s Description
After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.
Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel insists the baby is a “gift from God,” and against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.
Quotes from The Light Between Oceans
You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.
Scars are just another kind of memory.
Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.
We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.
Movie Trailer for The Light Between Oceans (2016)
About M. L. Stedman
M. L. Stedman is a former lawyer and author of the novel The Light Between Oceans. She was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London.