The Miles Between
Paperback
Series: West of the Setting Sun, Book 1
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
ISBN13: 9781066852109
Publisher: Willow on the Hilltop Press
Published: Aug 24 2026
Pages: 294
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.66 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A sweeping, Steinbeck-inspired debut road trip novel through the great American West
One perfect autumn, a young man from Northern Ireland and his wife of a few months collect a burnt-orange Mustang from a Los Angeles dealership and point it toward the vast American West. Ahead of them, the open highway. Beside them, a new marriage. Behind them, everything they have ever known.
Over a handful of unforgettable days, the road hands them strangers they will carry for the rest of their lives.
A mountain man who returns to the same spot every single year.
A philosophizing ranger longing for something beyond the walls of his cabin.
A woman in the desert running from something only she knows.
And a girl behind a gas station counter on the worst day of her life.
What begins as a scenic honeymoon quickly becomes a profound meditation on marriage and wilderness and mortality, and the freedom to choose who we become. Timshel. Thou mayest, as John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden, which has been adapted into a Netflix series due out this autumn.
The Miles Between is an evocative debut of literary fiction in the classic tradition of American road trips, told through the observant eyes of an outsider. It captures the ordinary encounters and moments that come to define a life.
It also serves as the first standalone book in the West of the Setting Sun Quartet. Four distinct journeys across the West, traveled through four reversing seasons.
For readers of John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Kent Haruf's Plainsong, Wallace Stegner, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road - and anyone drawn to deep nature writing, literary travel, and stories of self-discovery on the open road.
We had the whole road to ourselves.
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback
