I really enjoyed the author's first effort in Then We Came to the End, so didn't hesitate to pick this one up.
The protagonist has an unnamed condition that causes him to walk incessantly. My only quibble with the book is that the condition comes and goes several times, in almost a wishy-washy fashion, as does his wife's illness.
My favorite paragraph comes at the point in the novel when the walker, who has been wandering for several months, calls home and speaks to his daughter, who advises him that her mother (the walker's wife) has gone on vacation to France.
He stood in the snow-patched prairie with the ice-blue brook running toward the rafting centers and trailer parks, far from the south of France, far from Paris, and a wave of death washed over him. Not biological death, which brought relief, but the death that harrows the living by giving them a glimpse of the life they've been denied. Its sorrow was a thousandfold any typical dying.
