Blindness Will Be Like This. So says ten-year-old Will Burton, trying to reimagine his life in the wake of his father's abrupt disappearance, as his family picks up stakes and moves to California. Anoter boy, Rogelio Augilar, risks his life to cross the border illegally from Mexico to reach his father, enduring gangs, police roundups, and the pitiless desert. And Marlene McClure, a hard-edged, feisty teenager, leaves her own Midwestern home in search of a father she has imagined but never known. The lives of each of these families converge on a single home in Los Angeles--where the very needs and desires that have torn them apart allow them a measure of hope together. Written with heart-stopping grace and a powerful understanding of the needs and desire that define family, No Direction Home masterfully evokes how far we will go in the name of a place to call home.

"Inhabiting the uncomfortable space between loss and self-discovery, this debut novel by Silver (after the story collection Babe in Paradise) tells of missing fathers and the women and children they leave behind. Caroline, whose astronomer husband's departure dredges up memories of her father's abandonment, moves her twin 10-year-old sons, Will and Ethan, cross-country to Los Angeles to live with her parents. Caroline's father, motivated by decades-old guilt, has just hired a Mexican immigrant named Amador to care for his wife, who is quickly succumbing to dementia. Meanwhile, two willful teenagers, Marlene (Will and Ethan's illegitimate half-sister, the daughter of their absent father) and Rogelio (Amador's eldest son), embark on parallel, gritty expeditions in search of their fathers. Silver proves herself a deft juggler of plot lines and an effective realist; she conjures an aching world of half-truths, physical need and emotional frustration. Young Rogelio's adventures underground, in the lawless tunnels under the Mexican-American border, are particularly affecting, as are the struggles of Will, who suffers from a degenerative eye disorder and tries to learn to see the world 'from the inside out' by observing his grandmother's mental meanderings. Despite some easy moralizing and overextended metaphors, this is a moving novel, each of its well-wrought characters finding some comfort in the 'solace of in-between spaces.' (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)