Thank you, Saroo, for sharing your long way home. Not only does he accomplish this, but he gives the world a beautiful gift in the process. And yet, I suppose he’s just like the rest of us, simply wanting to fill in the mysterious holes of his life. To say that Brierly is an inspiration doesn’t come close to conveying what an extraordinary human being he is. “I’ve experienced so many coincidences that I’ve just learned to accept them-even to be grateful for them,” he writes. Upon closing the cover of this stunning book, I am left with Brierly’s quiet sense of courage and restraint, along with his complete lack of anger and bitterness. You will find yourself rooting for him every step-and flight and train ride-of the way. What is surprising is the boundless determination and creativity he employs to piece together his fragile history. Yet it comes as no surprise when Brierly decides in his 20s that he wants to find out where he came from.
In fact, he writes with remarkable tenderness about his mother and father, who help nurture him into a young man who is clearly articulate, gracious and bright. Start reading A Long Way Home: A Memoir on your Kindle in under a minute. Saroo’s story has been published in several languages and is now the major motion picture Lion. Make no mistake: his life is a good one, and he is grateful for everything his adoptive parents do for him. Born in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh, India, Saroo Brierley lives in Hobart, Tasmania, where he manages a family business, Brierley Marine, with his father. As he wanders the streets, the potential for danger is harrowing: “No one knows how many Indian children have been trafficked into the sex trade or slavery, or even for organs, but all these trades are thriving, with too few officials and too many kids.” He is ultimately adopted by an Australian couple and taken to a new house in a new country, far away.įortunately for Brierly, the second half of his memoir doesn’t have the grit and Dickensian feel of the first, but he does a formidable job of conveying how it feels to be dropped into a life that you didn’t necessarily ask for. I’m not giving anything away by saying that after arriving in Kolkata, Brierly cannot find his way home. By the time his inadvertent train ride begins, Brierly has systematically set the stage for this most daunting and pivotal of moments. Brierly’s details are so vivid that I can feel the dust on my feet and the rumble of hunger in my stomach I can hear the bleating of goats and the wail of Indian music from the town center. He shares memories of his mother, his three siblings, and how they struggle to get by. In warm, spare language that immediately mesmerizes the reader, Brierly starts his almost mythic tale by describing his poverty-stricken childhood in his rural village. The tragic circumstances by which he comes to board a train in Burhanpur (located in the western part of India) and then travel 1,680 kilometers east to Kolkata by himself are nothing short of spellbinding.
In his gripping memoir, A Long Way Home, currently in theaters as the movie Lion, Saroo Brierly untangles the story of how this very thing happened to him in India in 1987. Now consider that there is no Internet available to track down this five-year-old’s parents, no nightly news to post his little face on a television screen, and no one who notices him as he scavenges around the station for food.Ĭan you wrap your head around this scenario? Inconceivable, no? Picture this same five-year-old without money, identification, or the ability to remember his last name. Imagine a five-year-old accidentally boarding an empty train carriage in Chicago and traveling 1,000 miles alone across the United States, disembarking 24 hours later in, say, New Hampshire. will melt hearts around the globe."- People magazine "Amazing stuff.Rating: Going off the rails on a crazy train "The emotional journey of Saroo Brierley (Patel). This edition features new material from Saroo about his childhood, including a new foreword and a Q&A about his experiences and the process of making the film. And one day, after years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for and set off on a journey to find his mother. When he was a young man the advent of Google Earth led him to pore over satellite images of India for landmarks he recognized. Despite being happy in his new family, Saroo always wondered about his origins. Not knowing the name of his family or where he was from, he survived for weeks on the streets of Kolkata before being taken into an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia.
Saroo had become lost on a train in India at the age of five. When Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his long-lost home town half a world away, he made global headlines. The young readers' edition of the true story that inspired Lion, the major motion picture starring Dev Patel, David Wenham, Rooney Mara, and Nicole Kidman.