Throttle On

Fifteen thousand miles. Five months. One small motorcycle, pointed at the top of the map and the far edge of what a person can outrun.Michael Mirasole left Austin, Texas on an undersized bike with no business going where he pointed it — north, up the length of a continent to Deadhorse, Alaska and the Arctic Ocean, then the longer road home. What began as escape became something harder to name: grief carried at speed, solitude that stopped being lonely, and two grown children waiting at the other end of the silence.The road did not cooperate. He was pinned under his bike on a mountain he had no business being on. He rode out ahead of the Jasper wildfire as a town emptied behind him. He met strangers who said, in a gas-station sentence or two, the things he had crossed a continent to avoid hearing.Spare, exact, and unsentimental, Throttle On is a debut about motion as a way of standing still — about the baggage we carry that we don't need, and about the hardest leg of any journey, which is coming home.