“Jacob was time out of sync, time more perfect than it had been. He was life the way it was supposed to be all those years ago. That’s what all the Returned were.” Harold and Lucille Hargrave’s lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966. In their old age they’ve settled comfortably into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time…. Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep — flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old. All over the world people’s loved ones are returning from beyond. No one knows how or why this is happening, whether it’s a miracle or a sign of the end. Not even Harold and Lucille can agree on whether the boy is real or a wondrous imitation, but one thing they know for sure: he’s their son. As chaos erupts around the globe, the newly reunited Hargrave family finds itself at the center of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a mysterious new reality and a conflict that threatens to unravel the very meaning of what it is to be human. With spare, elegant prose and searing emotional depth, award-winning poet Jason Mott explores timeless questions of faith and morality, love and responsibility. A spellbinding and stunning debut, The Returned is an unforgettable story that marks the arrival of an important new voice in contemporary fiction.
Intriguing concept, disappointing execution I read the three free Kindle short-story prequels (“,” “” and “”) and was intrigued with the concept of the Returned: a book about large numbers of previously dead people returning to life whole, healthy, intact, and with all their memories unchanged…
A Very Different Walking Dead After finishing, there’s no wonder why there was a major bidding war between many of the top networks to bring this story to television. ABC won, and the show, retitled ‘Resurrection’, will premiere early next year on the Alphabet network. An elderly couple in the small town of Arcadia North Carolina answer their door one afternoon to find a government agent on their doorstep with their son Jacob. A child who died when he was eight years old, nearly thirty years ago. Their story becomes one of…
Depressing; not for me I really wanted to like this novel, but it’s rather depressing and, truth be told, I never really made a connection with the characters. This is a very finely written piece, don’t get me wrong, but my questions were never answered. Why the returned come, what their purpose is, where they go when they disappear… I just don’t know, and that was the main reason I picked up this novel; I wanted to know.Instead, this novel focuses on the appearance of the dead (not zombies, mind you),…