The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman

Available 26th April 2012. Published by Transworld Publishers.

Before this book comes out on sale, pencil it into a couple of free days in your diary because I promise you that you will not be able to put it down once you start.

The story revolves around the unlikely setting of a remote lighthouse on an otherwise uninhabited tiny island with the death and suffering of World War One as its backdrop.  The keeper Tom and his wife try and fail to have a baby until one day, one is washed ashore in a boat.  The father has died but the baby is very much alive.  Tom and Izzy stumble into a fateful decision that maps out bucket loads of heartbreak where no happy ending is ever going to be possible.

Right from page one, the characters and settings leap off the page...or rather you are flung into the heart of them.  Stedman is a remarkable writer who manages to carefully balance the utter beauty in her prose to avoid any hint of pretentiousness. Through economical smatterings of the most mesmorising imagery such as how Janus Rock, "dangled off the edge of the cloth like a loose button that might easilt plummet to Antartica", she makes every word count and before you know it, the characters and places are real and alive with only a little having been said about them.  Who ever thought a lighthouse could be a wonderful place to be?  Yet you find yourself there, feeling Tom's passion and care of the light; feeling as if you too are there being shown around by Tom himself.

As the characters and ever harsh landscape and weather become real and breath, so do the emotions and tragedies of the various characters in the novel.  I imagine some readers may decide the plot is predictable but this is part of the book's immense ability to break your heart.  You know that there can't be a happy ending; the author ensures you feel everyone's pain.  How many tears you cry, how often your heart is broken, the ebb and flow of emotions is the unpredictable plot.

Not many books reduce me to tears; the last one to do so was A Thousand Splendid Suns.  The Light Between the Oceans made me cry more. As the character of Ralph put it so eloquently "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 Light Between the Oceans is a tale of two good people who face those two tangled snakes that stubbornly refuse to be separated.

I can not praise this novel enough.  It is by far my favourite for some considerable time.  Make no doubt about it, it will become a film but no director or actor could ever come close to matching the magic that has been written.

It is even more astonishing that this is a debut novel.  I am already excited for the next.  Stedman is clearly one of those lucky devils that was born to write.