Everything Lost Returns : A Novel

The poignant, utterly original story of two women separated across time but united by the arrival of Halley's comet, as blazing and as daring as their stories.

1986. The Earthshine Soap Company has given Nona Dixon everything, from making her the brand’s first Earthshine Girl to launching her acting career. It also threatens to be the very thing that causes her to unravel when a group of Jane Does file a class action lawsuit accusing the company of putting harmful ingredients into their products. When Nona begins investigating Bertie Tuttle, the company’s third-generation owner, she uncovers a complicated history involving her benefactor and a mysterious woman named Opal Doucet. 1910. Seventy-six years earlier, Opal Doucet, a rural doctor’s wife, is pregnant, on the run, and desperate to get to Paris and to the charismatic spiritualist who supposedly communed with her first love. To save money, Opal goes to work in the Earthshine Soap factory as an Earthshine Girl where she uses her knowledge of medicine, and the spiritualist’s teachings, to prescribe cures to the women who’ve come down with mystery ailments. As she and Bertie Tuttle secretly partner in a labour strike intended to improve the working conditions at the factory, Opal must decide the cost of her own freedom. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Everything Lost Returns is a story of desire and friendship, guilt and redemption, and the power we have, in our own small way, to change the course of history.