THE LONG WAY HOME is a story about instruments that lie, engines that keep running anyway, and the difference between fixing something and letting it go. Grounded in real aviation detail ? water take-offs, dead reckoning, the small mechanical faith that keeps an old aircraft in the air ? and carried by a father-daughter relationship as stubborn as the amphibian itself, it's a mystery that widens with every chapter but never loses sight of what it's really about: two people, a slow old aircraft, and the long way back to each other.
For readers of grounded, character-driven speculative fiction who want their mysteries to fly ? literally.
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Peter Haldane has spent his whole life believing that a well-maintained aircraft and a careful pilot can survive almost anything. Thirty years as an airline engineer taught him that. So did a lifetime of trusting checklists over instinct, and instinct over hope.
Now retired, he's spending his days the way he always wanted to ? island-hopping across the South Pacific in VH-DGK, the homebuilt amphibian he's kept flying for decades, with his daughter Hannah beside him. She's a documentary photographer, a licensed pilot in her own right, and the only person who can tell him when he's wrong. It's slow travel, on purpose. Reefs, lagoons, small islands with no reliable fuel and no particular hurry. Exactly what they both needed after losing Hannah's mother.
Then, minutes after leaving the remote island of Motu Varo, an impossible cloud appears dead ahead ? and stays there, no matter which way they turn.
Their GPS fails. The compass spins without settling. The radio fills with overlapping transmissions from decades that shouldn't be able to reach them ? and somewhere underneath the static, Peter hears a voice he recognizes.
It's his own. Years older. Telling Hannah not to land.
They don't get the warning in time.
Beyond the cloud is Meridian Island ? a place outside ordinary time, where lost aircraft from every era of flight have been quietly gathering for longer than anyone can say. Wrecked bombers beside intact flying boats. A jet that vanished decades ago, resting in the jungle as though it landed yesterday. And survivors ? pulled from different centuries, held together by a settlement leader who has his own reasons for making sure nobody leaves.
Among them is a woman who claims to be Hannah. Fourteen years older. Hardened, careful, and certain of exactly one thing: she has watched her father die on this island before. More than once.
To get home, Peter and Hannah have to figure out why VH-DGK keeps being drawn into this place, keep the aging aircraft airworthy against odds it was never built for, and resist the growing pull of an alternate past that offers something neither of them ever thought they'd get to choose again.
Because the island doesn't just hold wrecked aircraft and stranded strangers.
It holds a version of the life Peter lost ? close enough to touch, and impossible to keep.
