The Long Ride Home – Paperback

The Long Ride Home is a gritty, emotionally sharp winter drama about family estrangement, grief, and the kind of closure you don’t get to demand-only earn.
Ebeneezer “Eben” Southerby has built a good life in Seattle. He’s a Boeing engineer working on a high-pressure airliner program. He’s married to Margaret, a middle school English teacher who keeps the household steady. He’s raising two teenagers-Jonah, 15, and Claire, 13-who still need their father even when they pretend they don’t. Eben’s life is busy, practical, and structured for a reason: it keeps the past at a safe distance.
Then a call from Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago blows that distance apart. Eben’s father, Jacob Southerby-a lifelong smoker and a man Eben hasn’t truly spoken to in eighteen years-is dying of lung cancer. Jacob listed Eben as his emergency contact. Jacob is asking for him.
Eben flies to Chicago, torn between anger and duty, and arrives in time for a brief reunion. The two men get only two days together before Jacob dies, leaving Eben with a storm of unresolved history and a single task: bring his father home. But early December unleashes a brutal winter system across the Midwest and central plains, grounding flights and stranding travelers. Eben can’t stay. Work is waiting in Seattle. His family is waiting in Seattle. So Eben makes a choice he never expected-he books a sleeper bedroom on Amtrak’s Empire Builder and begins the long ride west.
What follows is not a supernatural tale, not a melodrama, and not a tidy redemption story. It’s a grounded journey through real places, real train routines, and real human contradiction. Eben eats in the dining car with strangers, trades small talk over communal seating, wanders the observation car as winter landscapes slide past, and tries to sleep in a room that can’t quite contain everything he’s carrying. In the quiet stretches between stops, Eben argues with his father in his head, mourns what never happened, and confronts the uncomfortable truth that absence doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it arrives as “later.” Sometimes it wears the disguise of work. Sometimes it becomes a habit.
With mild profanity, dark humor, and an unflinching look at how families fracture, The Long Ride Home delivers an intimate, page-turning story about a man who thought he’d outrun his past-until the country slows down and makes him face it mile by mile.
If you like emotionally grounded fiction, family drama with bite, and contemporary stories of grief, reconciliation, and second chances, you’ll want to ride this one all the way to the end.