The Light Between Oceans

It is April, three months after Isabel’s arrival on Janus. It is her birthday, and she is pregnant. Both Tom and Isabel are overjoyed. Tom is full of mixed emotions about becoming a father. While Isabel is thrilled to share the news of her pregnancy with her parents, Tom has no desire to write his father or brother.

The reader learns more about Tom’s past. His father was exceedingly strict and abusive. He beat Tom regularly, and Tom’s brother, Cecil would tell on Tom in order to spare himself from their father’s strap. At age 21, after graduating from college and becoming free of his father, Tom sets out to track down his mother. The trail leads him to an abandoned room in a depressing boarding-house that smells of booze and cigarettes, where he learns that his mother had died just three weeks earlier. The scene is one that Tom never could have imagined. He enlists in the army a month later.

A violent storm keeps Tom on duty in the lighthouse all night. The noise of the storm drowns out Isabel’s cries for help, who is suddenly in distress and alone.