The Long Way

Some places you're supposed to drive past. Miles Donovan was raised to stop.Miles is forty-six, spectacularly unpublished, and nursing a hangover in Key West when a stranger presses a postcard into his hand - one that's been carried for fifteen years. A roadside pizzeria somewhere up the map, and a single line scrawled across the back: DON'T DRIVE PAST THIS ONE.Signed with a single letter. B.He should throw it away. Instead he points the car north.What follows is the long way - a meandering, hand-drawn route through the parts of America that don't make the brochure: fireworks stands and bait shops, a woman who keeps her late husband's things in a back room, a town that would rather you kept driving. Miles is looking for the man who signed the card. What he finds is a knot of small, quiet wonders - and one secret somebody buried on a mountain road with no guardrail.Warm, funny, and quietly devastating, The Long Way is a novel about noticing: the people we're taught to drive past, and what it costs to finally stop.Book One of the Department of Small Wonders.