James E. McCoy is seventy-eight years old, and the phone call comes on a Tuesday, the way the important ones always seem to. His oldest friend in the world is gone. So James does the only thing a man can do. He puts on his good coat, points his old car toward the town where he was born, and sets out on the long drive home to say goodbye.And as the miles roll by, the memories begin to come.The hand-me-down bicycle, and his father running down the street shouting for joy. The dead snake by the creek that began a seventy-year friendship. A girl in a blue dress at a dance by the river, and a marriage proposal dropped in a bed of petunias. A house with a porch. Two children. A grandson in a boat at dawn, asking the biggest question there is. And a promise, whispered by the woman he loved, that she would be waiting for him on the porch, watching down the road.James believes he is simply an old man driving back through his own life on the way to a friend's funeral. He is wrong about that. And only in the final pages, on the porch of the little white house where it all began, will James, and the reader, understand what this journey has truly been.Going Home is a warm, nostalgic, deeply emotional novel about friendship, family, memory, and the ordinary days we never know are the best ones while we are standing in them. It is a story with a final turn that reframes everything that came before, and leaves you not with sorrow, but with peace, and hope, and the quiet reminder that going home was never something to fear.It is a book to read slowly, and to press into the hands of anyone who has loved and lost, and who could use one gentle reminder that the people who went ahead of us are only waiting a little farther up the road.Some doors open the past. And some lead you all the way home.
