First published 2017
Five-year-old Saroo falls asleep on a train and wakes up thousands of miles from home, separated from his family in India. He spends weeks alone on the streets of Calcutta, struggling to survive as a lost child in an overwhelming city. An Australian couple adopts him, giving him a new life on the other side of the world. Years pass, but Saroo never stops wanting to find his birth family. As an adult, he turns to Google Maps, using fragments of childhood memories to search the vast landscape of India. He methodically scours satellite images, following railway lines and looking for familiar landmarks from his five-year-old perspective. The search becomes an obsession as he tries to match his fading recollections with the digital maps spread across his computer screen. This story explores how hope sustains a person through impossible circumstances and how the pull of family transcends time and distance.
Genres: adventure, biography-memoir, adoption, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, search-for-identity
Setting: Australia, Calcutta, India
Period: 21st-century
256 pages · Paperback · Epsilon Yayinevi