What are you reading?

The Light Between Oceans Genre?

Philosophy.

What’s it about?

humans into gods.

What do you think of it so far? This is Harari’s second book after his New York Times bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The first 200 pages feel a bit repetitive, but the last 200 are original and provocative, providing food for thought on the future of humanity.

Would you recommend it?

have read Genre? It’s not easy to define – a novel that’s somewhere between a tragedy and drama.

How did you get hold of it? It was a book club recommendation – I downloaded it onto my Kindle.

How far have you got?

Finished.

What’s it about? The story is told from the perspective of various narrators, most notably Tom, a World War I veteran who takes up a position as lighthouse-keeper on a remote island off the Australian coast, with his young wife Isabel. After trying but failing to have a child, they find a baby washed ashore and decide to raise her as their own. The devastating consequences impact not only them, but also the lives of their families and the townsfolk they left behind.

While the book is an easy read, it’s compelling, and it invites you to look more deeply into its key themes: morality, truth, self-delusion and the allocation of blame. It looks at how people often do the wrong things for the right reasons, and how these actions (like the lighthouse metaphor) can refract, magnify and project far beyond the individual, affecting everyone around them.

Throughout the book, the indifference of the ruggedly beautiful landscape and the stars that “have been around since before there were people” relay the perspective that, no matter how stormy our lives, we are but flecks in the ocean of time.

Would you recommend it? The novel is beautifully written and stays with you after you’ve put it down. It got a thumbs-up from our book club, for anyone who likes a good, girly read with a bit of substance. For those who like Michael Fassbender, they say the movie is good, too. To tell us what’s piled up on your bedside table, or what you’ve recently downloaded to your Kindle, dash off an email to editorial@expatliving.sg. It won’t take long!