NOWHERE/SOMEWHERE - Kyle Merrick

Daniel has spent years doing everything expected of a man who has survived the loss of his wife. He works. He keeps his house in order. He shows up when he’s supposed to.

He just hasn’t noticed how little of his life he’s actually living.

Then, at a filling station outside Indianapolis, he meets Caol Meurig. Their paths should cross for an hour. Instead, a conversation grows into a friendship, and before long Daniel finds himself on a journey neither man could have anticipated when he first offered a stranger a ride.

It begins with a promise made to someone who is already gone and a question that may still have an answer. Daniel is good at questions. He likes facts that can be checked, problems that can be worked through, and the reassuring possibility that if you look carefully enough, there is something waiting to be known.

Caol has a different way of looking at things. And every so often, he speaks of the past with a familiarity Daniel can’t quite account for.

Together, they follow the traces of one life into another, across places and years, through stories changed by the people who carried them and silences left by those who could not. Along the way, the search becomes something neither man expected: a friendship shaped as much by what they cannot know as by what they can.

Somewhere between leaving and arriving, Daniel begins to understand that finding an answer and finding your way are not always the same thing. Perhaps being lost and not knowing where you’re going aren’t quite the same thing either.

And sometimes, you have to go a long way from home to discover the difference between nowhere and somewhere.

NOWHERE/SOMEWHERE: The Adventures Between is a literary novel about friendship, grief, the stories we carry, and learning to live with questions that may never offer certainty.