The Light Between Oceans: The heartrending Sunday Times bestseller and Richard and Judy pick

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A lawyer and his wife—best give them a wide berth; some elderly couples, a pair of old spinsters (promising), but best of all, some toff’s daughter traveling on her own. The Sydney summer rain pelted the window, and sent the people on the pavement scurrying for shelter. Tom and Isabel have different answers to this question, and their behavior has serious consequences. Stedman grounds what could be a far-fetched premise, setting the stage beautifully to allow for a heart-wrenching moral dilemma to play out, making evident that “Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late. The miraculous arrival of a child in the life of a barren couple delivers profound love but also the seeds of destruction.

I simply wanted to add that Isabelle's reaction is the reaction of many women who experienced the trauma of multiple miscarriages and who knows that she has little hope of carrying full term babies. And darkness seeps into the sky second by second, until the shadows no longer fall but rise from the ground and fill the air completely.When he dreams about those years, the Tom who is experiencing them, the Tom who is there with blood on his hands, is a boy of eight or so. Getting to any possible answers (if there were any) or even seeing how it played out was just too painful.

It was a good move, because like me, my sister broke down at about the same place within the novel and needed to compose herself before continuing to read on. Unlike other reviewers here, I thought you could tell it was a first novel - eg great chunks of information about how a lighthouse works plopped down into the story - but it had some really interesting things to say about the moral dilemma at the heart of the story (the relative rights of parents and children)and a very tender portrayal of a marriage. Apart from the fairly good initial characterization of Tom Sherbourne as a WWI vet suffering from memories of a troubled childhood and PTSD from war time experiences, and some alright landscape descriptions, this book was, on the whole, filled with sappy, simplistic and sentimental writing than rendered the whole thing fairly bad. Who would judge a poor man harshly for keeping a bag of gold he found abandoned on a desert island and believed the owner dead? regardless, the strong evocative ability of the storytelling definitely makes reading this book worthwhile.You don’t have to agree with me, and you could think that this was the most AMAZING book and your eyes almost exploded from all the awesomeness that traveled through them to reach your brain which leapt in your skull with every sentence you read, and that is fine.