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Author: Visit Amazon's Jason Mott Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0778315339 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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"The Returned transforms a brilliant premise into an extraordinary and beautifully realized novel. My spine is still shivering from the memory of this haunting story. Wow." -Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling author of The Monster of Florence

"Jason Mott's impressive debut novel...is a tense and touching treatise on life, death and life again."
- USA Today

"White-hot debut."
-Entertainment Weekly, Summer Must List

"In his exceptional debut novel, poet Mott brings drama, pathos, joy, horror, and redemption to a riveting tale." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

"This book offers a beautifully written and emotionally astute lens at our world gone awry....Poet and debut author Mott has written a breathtaking novel that navigates emotional minefields with realism and grace."
-Kirkus, starred review

"Mott brings a singularly eloquent voice to this elegiac novel, which not only fearlessly tackles larger questions about mortality but also insightfully captures life's simpler moments....A beautiful meditation on what it means to be human."
-Booklist, starred review

"A wondrous surprise. With fine craftsmanship and a deep understanding of the human condition, Jason Mott has woven a tale that is in turns tragic and humorous and terrifying. Surely this will spark many a fabulous book club discussion." -Eowyn Ivey, New York Times bestselling author of The Snow Child

"A deft meditation on loss that plays out levels of consequence on both personal and international stages. Mott allows the magic of his story to unearth a full range of feelings about grief and connection." -Aimee Bender, New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

"This is a masterly first novel for Mott...it speaks to many aspects of the human condition....Highly recommended for those who love a strong story that makes them think."
-Library Journal, starred review

"Thought-provoking, occasionally dreamlike...Mott's story of literal life after death will catch readers by their hearts and capture their imaginations....Grab this book as soon as you possibly can."
-Shelf Awareness

About the Author

Jason Mott holds a BA in fiction and an MFA in poetry and is the author of two poetry collections. His writing has appeared in numerous literary journals, and he was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize. Jason lives in North Carolina.

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Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA; First Edition edition (August 27, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0778315339
ISBN-13: 978-0778315339
Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

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), and how the world decides to react to such an anomaly. However, no one has answers, so it's more or less the blind leading the blind, with some embracing the dead, some detesting it, and others ready to lock them up forever. Like I said, it's a very depressing tale. We learn how the government decides to handle it, which isn't very well, more like the Japanese Internment Camps than anything else, and we get to know characters... only to watch them traverse terrible atrocities and, ultimately, die. But why they emerged from the earth again, and what their purpose was aside from driving the story, well, I don't know.

What I did enjoy about the novel, though, was that the chapters break up to follow certain characters, even though it's told in third person, and we meet new returned and hear their brief stories. But again, it is all very tragic, and truthfully, I felt somewhat awful upon finishing it; angry with humanity. But maybe that was the purpose? People can turn evil, which is shown in this novel in very real sense, and while there are some good people interspersed, I really came out of this with a depressed soul and a feeling of disillusionment with humankind.

Overall, it's very well written, but such a depressing tale isn't really my speed.

Imagine someone coming to your door. They're dressed in a well cut suit and tie, looking official. You can tell by their air of authority that they are a government man. Behind that government man stands a young boy spouting the same joke you taught your child, the boy who drowned decades ago. The voice sounds the same and when you get a gander at him you see that it is your son, returned by some miracle from the dead. That's what happens to Harold Hargrave and thus starts "The Returned" and from the very first page I was hooked.

Lucille and Harold Hargrave are in their seventies now. They are good, decent people who know right from wrong and act accordingly, so when the government locates a concentration camp in their small town of Arcadia to contain the "returned", dead people who have mysteriously started showing up all over the world, they are forced to reconcile their beliefs with reality. They know the boy Agent Bellamy brought them is their son, but what does mean? They grapple with that question as more and more of the "returned" are relocated in Arcadia. Pressure builds between the living and the returned as soldiers transport truck loads of the living dead into Arcadia and stay to guard them. When Harold and his son, Jacob, end up in the camp, Lucille Hargrave decides to take action but not before the tension has built to a boiling point between the town's people, the soldiers, and the thousands of returned that now inhabit the town. I read with great anticipation to find how this was all going to play out.

Mott's characters are alive and vibrant. When Harold's smoker's hack becomes uncontrollable, my lungs burned. When Lucille chastises Harold for one of his many faults, I could hear my wife chastising me.

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