It’s the decisions that Tom and Izzy make as a consequence of the boat’s passengers, the rift this tears between duty and desire, right and wrong, need and responsibility, that change their lives and that of others for years to come. Inside the boat are two people – one dead, the other very much alive. One day, a few years into the posting and after terrible personal losses, a boat washes up on the shores of Janus Rock. But when Tom takes his new wife, Izzy, to this wild outpost of Janus Rock, the idyllic life Tom and Isabel thought they would have, one where they create a perfect family, unravels. Writing to each other, they maintain contact and a slow and welcome romance develops into a relationship. When he’s posted to Port Partageuse to relieve the last keeper (who it turns out went mad) on the remote Janus Rock, 100 miles off the coast of Western Australia, situated between the Indian and Southern Oceans, he is able to enjoy the isolation such a distant locale affords – that is, until he meets the passionate, day-dreaming Isabel who awakens him to the joys of feeling again. Grateful for the solitude lighthouse keeping affords him, he moves from post to post as a relief keeper, never staying in one place too long. The Light Between Oceans is a beautiful, moving tale of Tom Sherbourne a man whose war service and the unspeakable horrors he has endured have made him quiet, repressed and unable to express his feeling with ease. Discovering it was a debut novel, ostensibly about a returned WWI veteran come lighthouse-keeper by Australian born Margot L Stedman only increased my curiosity. There was something haunting as well as inviting about it, something liminal. I am not sure why I picked up this book, but from memory, I think it was the title that drew me.
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