A product of 1960s suburban Chicago, Michael Perry is the daydreaming son of a philandering father with little patience or interest in parenting. His is a childhood spent desperately seeking a father’s love and acceptance, yet seemingly failing at every attempt. Ultimately abandoning his father’s world, he ventures out to search for love and a sense of meaning to his life. Hitchhiking across the Great American Southwest begins a life of adventure that often finds him in unexpected places – from a desert commune called Drop City in Colorado to a Navajo Indian Reservation, his journey takes him to the thrill-seeking dangerous world of professional rodeo, and winds through California’s music scene … falling in and out of love along the way.

Discovering a passion for the ocean, he becomes a seagoing vagabond, abandoning life on the mainland to sail a small sailboat across the Pacific to South Sea Islands – living his own version of Adventures in Paradise. When finally meeting a fiercely independent woman who completely captures his heart, their future together is sorely tested by the heartbreak of infertility, further rupturing the fragments of emotional shrapnel from his own father.

Told with honesty and emotional depth, and based upon a true story, this coming-of-age adventure novel reminds us that while the paths we take may diverge, the road home is always within reach.