Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
Third Person (Omniscient)
The narrator of The Returning is one of those godlike narrators who sees everything and can skip around between different characters and between the past, present, and future. In fact, you might get a little bit frustrated with this, because sometimes the narrator spoils the story for you—more than once, the narrator gives us the ending before the beginning. For example, we know Cam survives the war and returns home before we see him take step on the battlefield. It can be kinda anticlimactic.
At other times though, the narrator jumps back in time to explain why things are unfolding as they are. Take when Cam goes searching for the no name soldier who saved his life. We get some flashbacks to what happened so we know why he's after this guy in the first place. This isn't information that any Downlander in the story has—in fact, none of them even find out by the end—but the narrator gives us this extra explanation so we know more than most of the characters in the book. If the narrator is a god, then we get to be demigods by their side.