In the summer of 1926, Hoot Gibson, a famed Western star, meets Wally Bishop, a runaway stagehand who joined the Army at sixteen and hasn't seen his family since the Great War, on a movie set in southern California. The movie's director, John Ford, lends them a vehicle for a life-changing journey. What begins as a simple home visit becomes a 1,700-mile odyssey across the raw, changing landscape that would become Route 66: it forces reckonings with battlefield memories, tests the bonds of brotherhood, and leads to unexpected acts of courage, faith, and forgiveness. As they drive from California to Arkansas along the roads that will become Route 66, they are awestruck by the vastness and beauty of America. Along the way, they face desert windstorms, small-town kindness, wartime flashbacks, and moral reckonings. A fragile friendship grows, old wounds are laid bare, and a single act of battlefield heroism resurfaces, changing everything.
Tender, cinematic, and redemptive, The Healing Road explores the costs of war, the courage required to come home, and the surprising ways two men repair each other. Perfect for readers of historical road fiction and character-driven literary fiction.