"We keep things inside, those of us who live in the Midwest. Anyone who lives out in the open where little stands between you and the horizon knows this. It's all sky. It's infinitely blue in summer and hammering gray in winter. So you keep your head down and your thoughts inside.

Yet the landscape is haunted with memories. The memories of lives lived having kept everything inside. They seep out of us like a spring or the fog and attach themselves to objects, sounds, smells, the wind. They attach themselves to anything that can bear to take them.

Some of the memories we keep inside, some of them are terrible. Terrible things done to us, and terrible things we have done to others. We keep them down, and we run. We run so far and so deep that memory becomes forgetfulness. We're lost. We're lost to the living of life."

So begins The Long Way Home - a closely observed account of the author's actual 5-week, 500-mile walk from Chicago to Minneapolis and parallel journey through the memories of his traumatic and painful life as a young man. His meetings with people and places along the journey open up the history, culture and experience of this part of the Midwest in a way that will captivate any interested reader.