e Light Between Oceans [suggested by Wendy Gibson]
After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes 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, 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, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel insists the baby is a “gift from God,” and 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. [Product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page and was made into a film in 2016 (see also IMDb).
M.L.Stedman has neither a website nor a Wikipedia page in her own right, at the time of writing. The author page on her publisher’s website (Simon & Schuster) contains only a single sentence about her.
Shortlisted for this month
The book selector for the month can choose up to three books for nomination. This month Wendy’s other choices, on a theme of the sea, were:
Salt to the Sea
In the cruel winter of 1945, four very different young people narrate their stories. Joana, Emilia and Florian are part of desperate group of refugees trekking across Germany, bound together only by their desperation to reach the ship that can take them away from the war-ravaged land. Alfred is a German soldier stationed on that ship.
This hugely touching, inspirational novel is based on a true story. When the German ship the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk in port in early 1945 it had over 9000 civilian refugees, including children, on board. It is the biggest maritime disaster in history, killing more people than the Titanic. Ruta Sepetys, acclaimed author of Between Shades of Grey, has brilliantly brought this story to light and created a group of unforgettable characters with unmissable stories. [product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page, and also a dedicated page on the author’s website.
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
The Perfect Storm
The worst storm in history seen from the wheelhouse of a doomed fishing trawler; a mesmerisingly vivid account of a natural hell from a perspective that offers no escape.
The ‘perfect storm’ is a once-in-a-hundred-years combination: a high pressure system from the Great Lakes, running into storm winds over an Atlantic island — Sable Island — and colliding with a weather system from the Caribbean: Hurricane Grace.
This is the story of that storm, told through the accounts of individual fishing boats caught up in the maelstrom, their families waiting anxiously for news of their return, the rescue services scrambled to save them. It is the story of the old battle between the fisherman and the sea, between man and Nature, that awesome and capricious power which can transform the surface of the Atlantic into an impossible tumult of water walls and gaping voids, with the capacity to break an oil tanker in two.
In spare, lyrical prose ‘The Perfect Storm’ describes what happened when the Andrea Gail looked into the wrathful face of the perfect storm. [product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page and has been made into a film (see also IMDb).
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.