Australia, 1926. After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.
Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.
M. L. Stedman's mesmerizing, beautifully written debut novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel's decision to keep this "gift from God." And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another's tragic loss.
The Light between Oceans
( dir. Derek Cianfrance
)
United States of America (USA)
New Zealand
:
Heyday Films
LBO Productions
DreamWorks SKG
,
2016
9322518
2016
single work
film/TV
historical fiction
A lighthouse keeper and his wife find and adopt a baby girl who is washed up on their isolated island in a lifeboat. But not all the girl's family are gone, and their decision will have ramifications.
'Based on the author’s end-to-end walk of the Cape to Cape Track (C2C), this article presents a literary history of the Leeuwin-Naturaliste region traversed by the trail. The C2C is a continuous, 135-kilometre coastal pedestrian path from Cape Naturaliste to Cape Leeuwin south of Perth in the south-west corner of Western Australia. A relatively short route by long-distance trekking standards, the C2C reverberates with literary narratives, incidents and encounters. In 1831, explorers John Dewar and Andrew Smith walked northbound from Augusta to the Swan River, approximately following the modern-day orientation of the track. Known for tempestuous weather, Cape Leeuwin—the southern terminus of the C2C, near Augusta, where the Indian and Southern Oceans converge—was the model for “Lewin’s Land” referenced in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and later alluded to in D.H. Lawrence and Mollie Skinner’s The Boy in the Bush (1924). Drawing from theories of emplacement (de Certeau; Edensor; Gros; Ingold; Ingold and Vergunst; Merleau-Ponty; Michael; Solnit), this article describes walking as a medium for understanding the imbrications between bodies, landscapes, journeys, histories and stories.' (Publication abstract)
'This essay joins in the discussion about the future of national literatures in the shifting formations of globalisation. Specifically, I want to interrogate what we mean by the future when we speak of literature and, specifically, of Australian or New Zealand literature.
The essay proposes a literary cartography that overlays the alienation of this ‘no world’ with the ‘no-place’ of island utopias as they are mobilised in archipelagic chains or threads. This alternative model of spatial relationality and dynamism differs from conventional global traffic. It is a cartography derived from islands: from their history, fictions, and their theorists. This project is at least partly utopian in a strictly generic sense; that is, in its implication in the reading practices and politics of utopian texts.' (Author's abstract)
