A successful college professor in her thirties, Simone Stark has achieved everything she has strived for—everything other than happiness. 

One winter day, in the face of unexpected news, Simone impulsively returns to her isolated hometown after a long absence. The snowy mountain landscape is meant to provide sanctuary, a sense of refuge, but instead awakens long-dormant desires and buried pain. 

When Simone reunites with her first love, a tantalizing future opens. But in the darkness of Simone’s childhood home, a series of unsettling encounters begins, revealing a presence that is both alluring and terrifying, a force she cannot decipher as good or evil, diabolic or divine. Is it a manifestation of her own inner demons or something far more real? 

Torn by conflicting desires, Simone must face both a present choice and a past that won’t stay hidden. As the power in the house grows stronger, the lines between reality and nightmare begin to blur, culminating in an encounter that will leave Simone forever changed. 

Our Lady of the Sign is a haunting, evocative exploration of freedom and temptation, of fear and love, of the lies women tell and the lies women have been told. It is a spiritual and psychological thriller that maps the darkest terrain of a woman’s soul—her capacity for reckless abandon and self-deception, but also for heroic love.

“In this intensely psychological story, Abigail Favale shows us, with great perception, the mind of her female protagonist. We come to understand this character’s wounds, her past, and her present, and we see a spiritual sign for her future. A deliciously atmospheric, and occasionally spine-tingling, read.”
—Sally Read, Poet and author, Annunciation: A Call to Faith in a Broken World

“Gritty, nuanced, and beautifully told, Our Lady of the Sign is an unsparing, philosophical novel in which good and evil wage war within a modern-day agnostic woman. Abigail Favale’s maturity and deep spiritual insight are palpable on every page. This story deserves a wide audience.”
—Rhonda Ortiz, Novelist and editor in chief, Dappled Things

“With relentless, surging candor, Favale’s mystical realism lays open the inner consistency of so many paradigmatically female experiences. Simone’s hero’s journey not only ferrets out the precise spot where the cancer of internalized misogyny has been growing in secret but also opens a portal toward remedy and remission.”
—Katy Carl, Author, Fragile Objects: Short Stories and As Earth Without Water

“Nostos. Homecoming—one of the very oldest and greatest themes of literature. Fittingly, for our fragmented age, Simone is struck by a whimsical nostos, returning at random to the Idaho of her childhood without really knowing why. Nostos gives way to nostalgia (-algos = pain), a sorrowful sense that life could have been otherwise . . . Favale invites us into these allurements, stirs up dizzying desires and stupid decisions until we’re ready to ‘choose what we’ve chosen.’”
—Joshua Hren, Founder, Wiseblood Books; author, Blue Walls Falling Down: A Novel

“The achievement of this novel is to combine two archaic kinds of story, the psychomachia, or spiritual battle, and the nostos, or homecoming. Our heroine, ‘questing for a quest’, discovers that true questing does not conclude but renders one ‘open to the mystery’ of the whole of creation. I cannot imagine a more perfectly paced and focused tale of the terrible and beautiful ordeal of truly learning to see and honestly face that creation—inward and outward, from the farthest star to the deepest, most veiled memory—just before it is too late, when the stakes could not be higher.”
—Jonathan Geltner, Author, Absolute Music: A Novel