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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 and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, 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, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. 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.
M. L. Stedman’s mesmerizing, beautifully written novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel’s decision to keep this “gift from God.” And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another’s tragic loss.
(Summary provided by the publisher.)
M. L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia, and now lives in London. The Light Between Oceans, her first novel, is an international bestseller, having spent well over a year on the New York Times Bestsellers list.
As well as being translated into almost forty languages, the book was nominated for the Miles Franklin Award, the Women’s Prize for Literature (the Orange/Bailey’s Prize), and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction to name a few, and won prizes including Best Literary Fiction, Best Newcomer and Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and Australian Indie Awards for Best Debut Novel and Book of the Year.
Director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond The Pines) is adapting the story for film, in association with producer David Heyman (Gravity, Harry Potter) and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios.
(Biography provided by the publisher)
