Searching for Paradise

By Hughes, T., L.

Book Id: WPLBN0100301801
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.9 MB
Reproduction Date: 11/10/2015

Title:	Searching for Paradise
Author:	Hughes, T., L.
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Drama and Literature, Travel Fiction
Collections:	Authors Community, Adventure
Historic Publication Date:	2015
Publisher:	Outskirts Press

Member Page:	Tom Kenney
Citation APA MLA Chicago L. Hughe, B. T. (2015). Searching for Paradise. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.cc/

Description
Mike Hogan and his two friends, disillusioned with trying to make it in Hollywood in 1984, have up and quit their respective eight-to-five working day jobs and have come up with a poorly thought out plan. They will drive to the East Coast of America in Luke Coppen's 1964 Ford Fairlane and from there fly to London in order to find work overseas in the burgeoning music video business. Along the way, they'll travel through Luke's home state of Kansas and Decky Brady's native Ohio. Mike has just lost the love of his life, Colette, so he feels like there is nothing holding him back in Southern California now. Their ensuing adventure is filled with old friends, family, and acquaintances. As the three friends bounce from place to place, freeloading across the expanses of beautiful America, they see life again through those they once knew and loved and through new friends and experiences. In the process of it all, they rediscover the goodness within themselves that was always there. Searching For Paradise is a coming of age story based upon a real life road trip across America, from California to New England. Filled with vivid imagery and resonating musical references to the artists and songs of the time, it is a love story of great depth and beauty.

Summary
In his sophisticated debut novel, T.L. Hughes draws on his New England upbringing in an Irish Catholic family to tell the story of his main character, Mike Hogan's, cross country venture back to the small mill town where he grew up.

Excerpt
Groggily I stepped out of the back into the open night air. There wasn’t a human sound other than that of the soft wind in my eardrums for tens of hundreds of miles, and the incredible beauty of the lighted sky hit me with a cracking wake-up punch that lifted my senses to an everlasting high. It was a sky so completely illuminated by eons and eons of just arriving fresh starlight. I had never seen so many glimmering lights before. Every star ever identified by the history of mankind; every nebulous cloud; every faint light that had ever graced the face of our earth . . . all of it now stood above us in a complete canvas exhibit of the endless heavens. The vapor-like gases that formed the outer stretches of our galaxy dispersed among the stars in a cloudlike line. We stood out there in sheer amazement for at least a half hour, pivoting in circles as we looked up, our feet imprinting the salt flats that we stood on. When I tired of standing, I lay down on the desert floor. I identified the big sauce pan of the dipper and followed it across to Polaris like I was a little kid again. We guessed possible constellations; we discerned the distinct yellow light of planets compared to the blue light of the stars; we saw distant blinking satellites crossing the star dust and tens of shooting stars that dove toward the horizon all at once. This was the night sky before the electric light had ever been invented, the sky of the great oceans and the Sahara, the sky of Antarctica and Siberia, the sky of our past, the sky where men of long ago sat around crackling fires and talked of what it all might be . . . those crazy blinking lights that came out every night and revolved around that single shimmering light that pointed due north; these were the night fires of the gods.