Paul

After a college baseball game in 1934, Paul Thompson disappeared into America. For nearly five years, he rode the rails as a hobo, drifting through a country of freight yards, migrant camps, hard men, generous strangers, and people simply trying to survive. Then one day, the prodigal son came home to rural Kansas. He nearly didn't survive the return. Beaten almost to death, Paul falls into the care of Dr. Thomas Browne, a modest small-town physician whose quiet manner conceals a past of his own. Doc learned medicine as a field surgeon in the trenches of France during the First World War, and more than a decade later, the war still follows him home. As Paul recovers, the story of his years on the road begins to emerge—along with the people, places, violence, kindness, and unexpected grace he encountered along the way. And in the friendship that develops between two men carrying very different wounds, each discovers something about survival, forgiveness, and finding one's way home. As Paul discovers: "Sometimes you need to get knocked out before you can wake up."