Return to Paradise

Lighthouse keepers Captain Robert Carlson and his wife Anna dedicated their professional lives to the work of guiding ships across the deep dark waters of Michigan's Great Lakes. They did so in an age when lighthouse keepers performed their work through anxious attentiveness instead of by the precise calibration of instruments.

Set against the backdrop of the early 1900s at the remote Whitefish Point Lighthouse in Paradise, Michigan, the Carlson's also guided the lives of their grandchildren, Bertie and Bobbie, whom they raised there at the light.

Narrated by an adult Bertie during a last visit to her childhood home, she unravels the captivating stories of her grandparents' pivotal roles at Whitefish Point and the timeless beacon that illuminates her path home.

Return to Paradise is also a saga of Bertie's sobering remembrance of the summer of 1918 when the isolation of the Carlson family suddenly ended as the family was thrust into the realities of a troubled world far away from the lonely shores of Lake Superior.