The Prodigal Book Tour

My Review

Once a high powered attorney Aidan Sharpe, now fallen must pick up his life. The book starts with Sharpe finding himself on the beach of Ocracoke Island after a night of heavy drinking with no memory of where or even how he ended up there. Think of the questions, the confusion. This man was at the top of his game and lost it all. If anyone needed a wake up call, it was Sharpe and he certainly got it in this book.

The adventure has already begun as he starts his journey of self awareness, awakening and discovery. One journey that grows throughout the book. I like how his character just builds with each turn of the page. It’s a steady growth that has you hooked and wanting to watch him continue his personal quest.
As he meets people throughout the Island he starts to transform, earning trust, finding love again, creating friendships. This all the while he is trying to restore this ship with history back to 1851 which appeared out of nowhere. It’s his new task to get this running for a race .
Secrets and questions arise leaving you with the thought of wondering -will all this new adventure he’s been traveling with destroy him?  Or help him grow even more as it continues?  Which path will he take if he even takes one?  Will he shut down this chance, or take it and keep moving on,  growing not just as a person but as a man who truly has more to offer.

 The events given to Sharpe are slowly tying into the past and you’re really intrigued from the first page. The saying the past haunts you really come back in this book, not as haunting but linking, a connection I would say. How much does the present connect to the events in our past? This is a constant growing question in the book.

I was taken in by the writing, happy to find out this was Michael Hurley;s first novel. It leaves room for so many more to come, and I look forward to it! I have rated this 5/5 stars and recommend it to any book lover.

For 2,000 years, Christendom has believed that faith and penitence are the narrow gates through which all who seek heaven must pass, and that the church on Earth holds the key. What if a forgotten relic, hidden inside an abandoned ship thought to have been lost at sea more than a century ago, suddenly reappeared and cast doubt on that belief? Who would seek to use it? Who would seek to destroy it? And whose lives would it forever change? 

 This sweeping allegorical tale begins with the escape of a Gypsy princess and her young lover from her father’s camp in 1851, recalling the flight of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The boy steals Prodigal, a sailing ship blessed with unnatural speed, and the lovers escape to sea, leaving the father to grieve for the loss and pine for the return of his child. 

 More than 150 years later on Ocracoke Island we meet Aidan Sharpe, an aging lawyer, as he rises from the sand of a remote beach after a lost weekend. In a strange foreboding, one woman gives him wine and another gives him water just as his world is about to be consumed by scandal. While struggling to rebuild his life in this lonely outpost of the Outer Banks, Aidan is caught up in a two-thousand-year-old mystery that unfolds with the sudden reappearance of Prodigal off the coast, adrift and unmanned. Its discovery will lead Aidan and those close to him into the deep, in a race between time and eternity.

About the Author

Michael Hurley and his wife Susan lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Born in Baltimore in 1958, he holds a degree in English education from the University of Maryland and a law degree from St. Louis University. His first book, Letters from the Woods, was a collection of essays compiled from eight years of wilderness canoeing expeditions with his children. It was a finalist for the Book of the Year Award by ForeWord magazine in 2005. In April 2013 Hachette Book Group published his memoir, Once Upon a Gypsy Moon. The Prodigal is his first novel.

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