"Count your blessings," his mother told him, "Think of everything good in your life."

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir, From Our House, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands, Gone the Hard Road is the story of Beulah Martin's endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor's office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children's book club, to the books she bought him in high school. Gone the Hard Road portrays Beulah's selflessness as the family moved around the Midwest, sometimes in the face of her husband's opposition, to show her son a different way of being. Rather than concentrate on the life his father threatened to destroy, as Martin's previous memoirs do, Gone the Hard Road offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible, in spite of the eventual cost to herself.

A poignant, honest, and moving read, Gone the Hard Road will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.

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An award-winning fiction writer, essayist, and memoirist, Martin (b. 1955) creates an affecting portrait of his troubled childhood in a small Illinois farming town. . . . Martin's hard road involved recognizing his emotional legacy: inheriting from his father a constant feeling of wariness against forces that were "waiting to hurt me" and from his mother, a desire to believe in a God who will keep him "safe and free from harm."

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Gone the Hard Road is a follow-up to his first memoir, told in thirteen connected essays. It focuses on his mother, a compassionate woman, who, in spite of her family's hardships, remains positive and optimistic. . . . In Gone the Hard Road, Martin tells his story of growing up in rural Illinois with great passion, love, and undying hope.