Author Description

A tale of cat and mouse. A good old-fashioned adventure. A story for anyone who has wandered, lost and alone, or wishes they could. This is the tale of a girl called Anya Netherby who, with one rash decision, suddenly finds herself on the run. She has no one to turn to and nowhere to go. She wanders aimlessly, beginning to fear she has made a bad mistake, and with no idea how to put it right. Her luck turns when she discovers an abandoned puppy. The dog is the reason Anya meets an itinerant photographer, and then everything begins to change for her. She discovers that her homelessness is hardly unique. It is the Great Depression and, like her, hordes of people have taken to the road. She meets peddlers and tramps and hobos, for her, a new kind of people, with different values and offbeat attitudes. They have met their disappointments and failures by side-stepping them. They ride the rails, they wrangle rickety trucks and horse-drawn wagons, they walk. She sees people who are doing anything they can to survive: whole families, lonely men, abandoned and orphaned children, and teenagers by the thousands, all traveling the highways and byways of America. She comes to realize that to wander aimlessly is not pointless. A person may not know where she is going, but the way ahead need not be treacherous. It is, in fact, how all important journeys begin.