Laravel 5.3 session not persistent

Hi all, for the past couple hours i have been trying to get a laravel app to save the session properly. The problem is: When i call "Auth::login($user);" then right after in the same method i call "return Auth::user();" it works however, when i go to a new route and call "return Auth::user();" it returns null. Here is some of the code:

Handle callback method:

  public function handleProviderCallback() {

        $returnedUser = Socialite::driver('google')->user();

        $user = App\User::find($returnedUser->id);

        if (is_null($user)) {

           $user = new App\User();
           $user->id = $returnedUser->id;
           $user->email = $returnedUser->email;
           $user->confirmed = false;
           $user->role = 'unassigned';

       }


       $user->avatar = $returnedUser->avatar;
       $user->save();

       Auth::login($user, true);


       return Auth::user();

       return redirect(route('home'));
    }

User

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Auth\Authenticatable;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Auth\Passwords\CanResetPassword;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\Access\Authorizable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable as AuthenticatableContract;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Access\Authorizable as AuthorizableContract;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\CanResetPassword as CanResetPasswordContract;

class User extends Model implements AuthenticatableContract, AuthorizableContract
{
    use Authenticatable, Authorizable;
    /**
     * The database table used by the model.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $table = 'users';

    /**
     * The attributes that are mass assignable.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $fillable = ['id', 'email', 'role', 'avatar'];

    /**
     * The attributes excluded from the model's JSON form.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $hidden = [];

    /**
     * Dates which can be converted into Carbon objects
     * @var array
     */
    protected $dates = ['created_at', 'updated_at', 'deleted_at'];

}

Any help would be great!

Thanks, Grant