If you’ve just read a novel prior to seeing the film derived from it, you tend to know what to expect in the way of major plot manoeuvres. Attention is then apt to focus on how the filmmaker has responded to the original, and the ‘what’ can then often be seriously challenged. As one who believes fidelity to be great for relationships, I favour playing around for adaptations.

Where then does The Light Between Oceans stand in this matter? Director–screenwriter Derek Cianfrance, in adapting M.L. Stedman’s engrossing 2012 bestseller (reviewed by ABR in April 2012), has opted to retain to a remarkable extent the novel’s narrative trajectory – with one major exception. Stedman opens her novel on Janus Rock island, with a boat containing a dead man and a baby washed up and pulled into shore by lighthouse-keeper Tom Sherbourne, whose young wife, Isabel, urges him to delay reporting this to the authorities, and embraces the child.