"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. They've settled into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time...Until one day Jacob 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 the beyond. As chaos erupts around the globe, the Hargrave family finds itself at the centr of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a new reality and a conflict that threatens to unravel the meaning of what it is to be human." -- page [4] of cover.