The Prodigal Returns

At ten, she felt a great bridge was about to collapse—and wept as her family scolded her for the warning. The next train across it plunged into the ravine.

In gardens, train stations and sunlit landscapes across Europe, an unnamed narrator looks back on a childhood shaped by beauty, separations and sudden intimations of danger. She loves fiercely: parting from her brothers is agony, while grief and loneliness draw her inward to an imagined companion of boundless courage. A vivid child’s faith gives God a white-robed presence in the clouds, but also a stern angel who records every fault. As she grows, that private world travels with her into adult life, where love, desire and the search for spiritual truth pull at one another. Can the child who feared the angel discover a deeper way to understand God—and herself?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.