Clifford D. Simak

Collier Nucleus, 1992. Trade paperback; a very attractive edition. An early and interesting Simak novel, first published in 1951. When a long-lost spaceman returns to Earth from a distant planet where our "souls" may live, his fuddled observations spark a religious schism and war.

In this Hugo Award-winning classic, Enoch Wallace is an ageless hermit, striding across his untended farm as he has done for over a century, still carrying the gun with which he had served in the Civil War. But what his neighbors must never know is that, inside his unchanging house, he meets with a host of …