The Light Between Oceans    byM.L. Stedman

 Through the central character Tom, this interesting story provides a sensitive look at how WWI affected men who returned home ‘unscathed’ , that is, appearing to be of sound limb perhaps, but very emotionally disturbed by their war experiences.  Tom’s insight into his own state of mind leads him to expect to take a long time to heal. Many returning soldiers had little understanding of this and found little true understanding among people around them of how war scars psyches as well as bodies.

Quoting from the blurb on GoodReads:  “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”.

Lucy’s natural mother, still lives in the small coastal town where Isabel grew up, from which the annual supply boat to the lighthouse is based, from where the boat with baby and father aboard set out, and she has never accepted that her daughter could be, indeed most likely is, dead.  Gradually, and its complicated (but at no time too complicated to follow) she learns that her husband died but that the baby was rescued.  As the story unfolds further we learn a lot about her life and how the father and baby came to be adrift at sea in a boat, and the incedible luck that the boat washed up on the rock/island it did.  The lives of all people surviving this strange but interesting set of events are set totally upside down, at times incredibly tragically, however the whole saga ends with a note of hope.  Like a richly woven multicoloured brocade – this book is enjoyable on so many levels, including vignettes of 1920’s Australian social values, the role of isolation and communication in our nation building era, and fascinating accounts of the now vanished way of life of the lighthouse keepers around our coasts, and so much more.   This is a fantastic first novel. and Margot Stedman’s next work will be eagerly awaited by many.

We also recently discussed Tom Kenneally’s  book, The Daughters of Mars which I thoroughly enjoyed. as did most others in the group.  It’s an intriguing story of fiction based on actual accounts in letters and wartime diaries of several Australian soldiers and nurses nurses involved in Egypt, Greece, France and UK