The Light Between Oceans

When Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel suffer the devastating loss of their stillborn son, after two miscarriages before, while isolated on their lighthouse island, things seem bleak. But two weeks later, a boat is washed ashore carrying a dead man and a baby in need of looking after. Against his own judgement and in a bid to keep Isabel happy, Tom agrees to keep the boat a secret and they pretend the baby is the one they actually lost. Years later, Tom and Isabel find out more about the baby’s origins and struggle with the ramifications of their decision.

This was a beautiful, moving story about a couple who loved each other desperately and the children they were unable to give life to. I was engrossed in this story and the characters struggles, both their physical ones and the ones on the grounds of their own morality. I found myself, at times, wanting Tom and Isabel to stay away from the mainland as long as they could so no-one would ever have to know the ‘terrible’ thing they had done in a moment of grief and loss.

I definitely loved Tom as a character more than Isabel. He had more interesting of a background, suffering from his own memories of WW1, and the friends and comrades who had died there and leaving him wondering why he had survived. This all seemed to play into decisions he made in the later stage of the book and reading about him going through all of this really endeared me to him and want to comfort him.

I did like the ending of this, though I would have liked to have seen Tom and Isabel somehow have a child. I think I just hated the fact that Tom was left alone (even though I know Lucy-Grace and her son would be visiting).