The Longest Way Home

The author, a travel writer and actor, delivers a memoir about how travel helped him become the man he wanted to be, helping him overcome life-long fears and confront his resistance to commitment. From time immemorial, travel has been a pursuit of passion, from adventurers of old seeking gold or new lands, to today's spiritual and pleasure seekers who follow in the footsteps of Elizabeth Gilbert. Some see travel as a form of light-hearted escapism while others believe it has the power to open your mind, forcing you to confront your demons, and discover your true self. The author belongs to this second category of traveler. His memoir follows his excursions to Patagonia, the Amazon, Costa Rica, Baltimore, Vienna, Kilimanjaro, Dublin, and beyond. He uses his wanderlust to examine his motives and desires, and explore his ambivalence about commitment. He ponders his personal life, his acting career, and his impulse to leave home, all building toward one of the most significant moments of his life: his wedding day. His message about the transformative power of travel is universal, and his exploration of the nature and passion of relationships, both fleeting and enduring, strikes a chord with every man and woman who has ever wondered at the vicissitudes of the human heart.

For more than a thousand years, Homeworld has been unchanged: the Great Houses rule and peace between them is enforced by unbreakable webs of kinship. The Folk accept what the system offers them - stability, prosperity and peace - and the Indigenes are placid. Then, on one night of rebellion everything changes, as the Folk overthrow the Great Houses. Joseph, the young son of one Great House is visiting another and survives the violence, but his home is ten thousand miles away and communications and transport have been destroyed. For all he knows his family may have been wiped out but his only hope lies in making that ten thousand mile trek across a world turned strange and hostile. To succeed, he must set aside all his old beliefs and assumptions and learn the truth about the world he lives in.

SPECIAL PREVIEW! A debut novel about one girl’s discovery of family secrets, first love, the limits of forgiveness, and finding one’s way in the world, written with wisdom and sympathy by the bestselling memoirist, actor, and director. When fifteen-year-old Lucy Willows discovers that her father has a child from a brief affair, an eight-year-old boy named Thomas who lives in her own suburban New Jersey town, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her family and her life. Lucy can’t believe her father betrayed the whole family, or that her mother forgave him, or that her sister isn’t rocked by the news the way Lucy is. Worse, Lucy’s father’s secret is now her own, one that isolates her from her friends, family, and even her boyfriend, Simon, the one person she expected would truly understand. When Lucy escapes to Maine, the home of her mysteriously estranged grandfather, she finally begins to get to the bottom of her family’s secrets and lies. Fans of the rebels and antiheroes in the novels of Rainbow Rowell, A. S. King, and Meg Wolitzer will welcome this sharp, observant new voice in young adult fiction.

Meet the Grogans Before there was Marley, there was a gleefully mischievous boy navigating his way through the seismic social upheaval of the 1960s. On the one side were his loving but comically traditional parents, whose expectations were clear. On the other were his neighborhood pals and all the misdeeds that followed. The more young John tried to straddle these two worlds, the more spectacularly, and hilariously, he failed. Told with Grogan's trademark humor and affection, The Longest Trip Home is the story of one son's journey into adulthood to claim his place in the world. It is a story of faith and reconciliation, breaking away and finding the way home again, and learning in the end that a family's love will triumph over its differences.

A New York Times Notable Book: A far-future coming-of-age tale from the SF Grand Master, “one of the world’s finest stylists and storytellers” (San Antonio Express-News). “What wonders and adventures he has to tell us,” is how Ursula K. Le Guin characterized the work of Robert Silverberg, and in The Longest Way Home, he takes readers on another dazzling odyssey. Joseph, fifteen and separated from his family in the land known as Getfen, awakens to an attack on the Great House in which he is visiting. Narrowly escaping with his life but still pursued by enemies who wish to see him killed, Joseph must journey across a dark, unfamiliar world on his quest to return to his home of Helikis and his father. He has thousands of miles to travel and much to learn about this perilous alien world in transition—and about himself. “What the greatly changed Joseph might find at the end of his journey, and how he might react, are questions that I came to care deeply about.” —The New York Times Book Review “The Longest Way Home recalls, in a lot of ways, the old-time frontier adventures, not the ones with the cowboys and the Indians, but the ones where people have to learn to survive in the wilderness or along the prairie. [Joseph’s] adventures in survival are exciting, and the travels along this world are a pleasant escape.” —SF Site “This engaging, entertaining book is a fast read with many thoughtful themes.” —School Library Journal

"For more than half a century, the extraordinary range of vocabularies and styles in Joyce's Ulysses has been an object of critical and scholarly attention. For the better part of a decade, R. W. Dent has been gathering documentation on a single aspect of this work, what may loosely be called the "colloquial language." The result of this research, Colloquial Language in Ulysses, as its subtitle implies, is essentially a reference tool. It uses "colloquial" in the ordinary sense, "characteristic of or appropriate to the spoken language or to writing that seeks the effect of speech; informal." Taking heart in the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary and Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English frequently disagree on the matter, Dent includes as colloquial a great deal that purists might question or disallow." "For the most part, this work provides raw, useful data for Ulysses critics and scholars, but it rarely attempts to perform the work of literary critics. It will make users aware both of new information and of information already available in such reference works as the recently revised OED, for many users not readily accessible. Like the OED itself it is necessarily a work-in-progress, especially in its efforts to provide pre-Ulysses evidence, but it is abundantly useful in its present state." "Most entries supplement - and many correct - entries in its principal predecessor, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. Colloquial Language in Ulysses attempts to include all colloquial expressions on which Gifford is seriously inadequate, questionable, or demonstrably mistaken, and all on which the 1988 edition differs substantially from the earlier edition of 1974."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved