Our paid subscribers heard about The Long Way Around first, when it came out on Kindle last week. As of today, November 9, it's also out in paperback and hardcover, and I'd like to share it with everyone on Heroes' Path, along with the story behind it.
The book opens on February 24, 2022, in Prymorske, a small town on the Sea of Azov east of Mariupol. Within weeks the town is under Russian occupation. At a filtration point in the town school, Oksana Kovalenko's three children are put on buses and driven south into Crimea, and from there into Russia, where they're given new papers and Russian names.
Four years later, a small office in Kyiv needs someone to go into Russia after them. That someone is Halyna, a sixty-four-year-old feldsher from Zaporizhzhia with a bad hip. There's no straight road from Kyiv to Moscow, so she takes the long way around. The characters are invented. The filtration points and the deportations are real, and the Author's Note at the back lays out the sources.
You can find it on Kindle, in paperback for $14.99 and in hardcover for $24.99. If you read it, I'd be grateful for an honest review on Amazon. A few sentences is plenty.
A large portion of the proceeds will go to Save Ukraine, one of the primary organizations bringing Ukrainian children home after they've been abducted to Russia. By its own count, Save Ukraine has rescued 1,907 children, and more than 19,546 Ukrainian children have been officially documented as deported. You can support their work directly at saveukraine.org.
The trip behind the book was my third to Ukraine, in September 2025, with former Congressman David Bonior, Ron Clark and Jack Devine. Part of that trip was a visit to Save Ukraine's Hope & Healing Center outside Kyiv, where the staff care for children who've been brought home from Russia. My good friend Dave Morgan was a first reader and a sanity check on the story.
David was one of the first readers too. After I sent him an early copy, he wrote back on October 17 about what he'd heard on an earlier visit: "When I visited Save Ukraine in Kyiv in 2023 we heard of similar stories about grandparents going into Russia in the North of Ukraine and working themselves down to the Crimea area in search of their grandchild."
A few days later he wrote again. On another visit to Save Ukraine, his group had met two teenagers who'd been rescued after about a year in Crimea and then in Russia itself. "I just wanted you to know that I think your book is a real winner and true to the reality of abducted/stolen children." Coming from someone who has sat across from these kids, that meant a great deal to me.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/my-latest-novel-is-out-the-long-way
