Talking Tuesday: The Light Between the Oceans

While traveling last month, I read The Light Between the Oceans.  It is a beautiful, haunting, heart-wrenching book.  There is so much to savor in the story, so many beautifully wrought descriptions of the ways of life, of grief, loss in wartime, of motherhood, and long term relationships.  I picked out a few passages that I liked and thought I would share them here over a few Talking Tuesday posts.

"He begins to shape his routine.  Regulations require that each Sunday he hoist the ensign and he does, first thing.  He raises it too when any "man o' war," as rules put it, passes the island.  He knows keepers who swear under their breath at the obligation, but Tom takes comfort from the orderliness of it.  It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization."

~M.L. Steadman, The Light Between the Oceans, (New York: Scribner and Sons, 2012), 35, emphasis mine.