The middle of book describes the happy years of the infant Lucy growing into a toddler under the loving care of Isabel and Tom. They only visit the mainland every other year. Isabel's parents are delighted to be doting grandparents and are so proud of how Isabel has blossomed as a young mother. But visiting the mainland pricks Tom's conscience; he discovers that Lucy's real mother is still alive and still grieving over her lost husband and baby.

The final third of the novel is about consequences. Grief, anger, betrayal and shattered trust - it is a time of supreme unhappiness for all the characters in the book.

I am not a parent, so perhaps that is why I cannot sympathize with Isabel. I liked the character Tom, but Tom should have simply reported the dead body and living baby found in that rowboat. But of course, then there wouldn't have been this novel.

This bothered me when I read it: on page 253, Stedman writes : "Instead, he [Tom] sought comfort in perspective: in his mind's eye, he mapped out on the ceiling the exact position the stars would be in that night, starting with Sirius, always the brightest; the Southern Cross, then the planets - Venus and Uranus - all easily visible in the sky over the island." Uranus is not visible from Earth, except under the most optimal dark sky viewing conditions when it can be perceived as a tiny dot of magnitude of just 6.0 (at the absolute limit of human perception). Change Uranus to Saturn or Jupiter and the sentence is plausible.