Long Way Round

A boy loses his father and finds the road. The road gives him everything else.

Joe Cahill left school at fifteen with no qualifications and no plan, just the knowledge that his mother was working four jobs and his little sister needed someone around. What he found instead of a classroom was a bus depot on the edge of Shepparton, a taciturn foreman named Nev, and a fleet of Denning coaches that changed the direction of his life entirely.

Over forty years and half a million kilometres, Joe drove the routes that stitch this country together. Alice Springs in forty-three degree heat with a broken air conditioner and twenty-eight passengers who needed to believe everything was fine. Darwin in the wet season, when the roads made their own decisions. The Gold Coast run, which produced more stories per kilometre than any other route in the fleet. Canberra, which was quieter than you'd think and more interesting than it appeared.

He drove regulars who became part of his rhythm: Raymond, who did the Alice run every October for a wife who never got to go. Margaret from Mildura, who always took seat 7A and always left shortbread on the ledge without ceremony. The man who fell asleep by Seymour on every single trip and woke up, without fail, exactly twenty minutes before arrival.

Told in Joe's own voice; plain, dry, warm, and occasionally very funny, Long Way Round is a fictional memoir about work and loss, about the particular patience that long roads teach, and about all the strangers who trusted one man with the getting there.

Perfect for readers of Australian fiction, anyone with a love of the open road, and bus and transport enthusiasts who know their Denning Landseer from their Denning Mono.

Long Way Round is the fifth novel from Dan O'Riordan, a Victorian writer and long-haul coach driver with over ten years behind the wheel on Australia's interstate routes.