A Novel
The Long
Way Home
Eleanor Ashgrove
A Novel · 2021
The Long Way Home
At sixty-eight, retired mapmaker Ingrid Voss sets out on foot along the border roads of her youth — three hundred miles to deliver, in person, an apology forty years overdue.
About This Book
Ingrid Voss spent her working life drawing lines other people would follow. Retirement leaves her with good boots, a bad knee, and one unfinished piece of business: the friend she left behind at a border crossing in 1981, when choosing the safe road felt like wisdom.
Each chapter follows one stage of the walk — ferry towns, orchard valleys, a mountain pass closed since her youth — and each miles brings the landscape of the past closer to the ground under her feet. Funny, footsore, and quietly devastating, The Long Way Home asks what it costs to arrive late, and whether arriving still counts.
Inside
- I. The Packed Bag
- II. Ferry Towns
- III. The Orchard Valley
- IV. The Closed Pass
- V. Arrival, Late
An Excerpt
“A map is a promise that the world will hold still long enough to be crossed. At mile ninety, with the rain coming sideways and her knee keeping its own counsel, Ingrid understood that every promise she had ever drawn was, strictly speaking, a hope with good penmanship.”
— From Chapter III, “The Orchard Valley”
Details
- Genre
- Literary fiction / journey novel
- Published
- 2021 · Ashgrove Letters
- Pages
- 318
- Formats
- Hardcover, ebook, audiobook
What Readers Say
“I walked my own neighborhood differently for a week after finishing. A pilgrimage in paperback.”
— Trail & Tale reading group
“Ingrid Voss is the heroine late life deserves — cranky, tender, unstoppable.”
— Meridian Books Weekly