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The Roadmap of Loss
It's 1997 in Melbourne, Australia, and Mark Ward is struggling to make sense of the world following the sudden death of his mother. His father, Dylan, had abandoned him and his mother when Mark was still a child, and Mark has always believed he died in a car accident shortly afterwards. For most of his life, he has carried an unjustifiable sense of guilt about his father's absence, overlaid with memories of him as a cruel and unloving man. Clearing out his mother's house, a bereft, rapidly deteriorating Mark is shocked to discover a collection of letters written to her by Dylan - some of which postdate his supposed death. Discussing life and love, fears and dreams, set against the backdrop of his bohemian travels across the United States, Dylan's letters become beacons for Mark, who sees in them a final chance to achieve closure, as well as his own redemption. With a burning suspicion that Dylan may still be out there, Mark decides to retrace the journey taken by his estranged father twenty years earlier. Moving through the country with only a beat-up car as company and the letters of a stranger for guidance, Mark is faced with the enormity and polarity of late nineties America. Bouncing from one city and bizarre situation to the next, he encounters a tapestry of people along the way - many of them eccentric, some malign, some nurturing, others as lost as he is. Alone in a foreign land, the search for peace soon becomes a battle with loneliness, addiction and nihilism as Mark begins to see in himself reflections of the father he grew up resenting. Raw and uncompromising, The Roadmap of Loss explores human fallibility and vulnerability, the courage of letting go of the past, and the power of forgiveness.
368 pages, Paperback
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 3, 2024
Dylan Ward is killed in a car accident only weeks after walking out on his wife and five-year-old son leaving them to fend for themselves.
The smell of alcohol always triggers memories of his father. Memories of smashing glass, shouting, arguments, his mother’s cries. Mark knows his father was not a good man and yet he blames himself for his father’s flight and for twenty years the hatred has festered and rotted his heart.
Mark is twenty-five when his mother dies. He decides to sell the family house. While cleaning the house and getting rid of everything in preparation for sale, he discovers a shoebox in a wardrobe. Inside is an envelope with a wad of yellowed letters. Letters from his father to his mother. Letters that are dated after his death. Letters from a dead man? Mark’s mother had lied to him about his death.
The first letter indicates that his father did not die in a car accident. He moved to America and travelled the country. Each letter finds his father in a new location and Mark decides to travel to the States and follow in his footsteps. Hopefully to find him but at the very least more about him. It has been twenty years, but Mark realises he has no choice, uncontrollably compelled.
This is a novel about a road trip. A journey not just in location, but in finding the father that Mark has hated for so long. Finding why he left them and what kind of a man he is. It is a journey of self- discovery as Mark finds out much about himself, and to his horror, that he may be closer than he thinks to the father he despises. Travelling the same route, has he become his father?
An excellent debut.
The smell of alcohol always triggers memories of his father. Memories of smashing glass, shouting, arguments, his mother’s cries. Mark knows his father was not a good man and yet he blames himself for his father’s flight and for twenty years the hatred has festered and rotted his heart.
Mark is twenty-five when his mother dies. He decides to sell the family house. While cleaning the house and getting rid of everything in preparation for sale, he discovers a shoebox in a wardrobe. Inside is an envelope with a wad of yellowed letters. Letters from his father to his mother. Letters that are dated after his death. Letters from a dead man? Mark’s mother had lied to him about his death.
The first letter indicates that his father did not die in a car accident. He moved to America and travelled the country. Each letter finds his father in a new location and Mark decides to travel to the States and follow in his footsteps. Hopefully to find him but at the very least more about him. It has been twenty years, but Mark realises he has no choice, uncontrollably compelled.
This is a novel about a road trip. A journey not just in location, but in finding the father that Mark has hated for so long. Finding why he left them and what kind of a man he is. It is a journey of self- discovery as Mark finds out much about himself, and to his horror, that he may be closer than he thinks to the father he despises. Travelling the same route, has he become his father?
An excellent debut.
February 2, 2024
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The Roadmap of Loss is an affecting story about loss and grieving. Liam Murphy's writing is lyrical and evokes a sense of melancholy.
Mark Ward has always struggled with his sense of self carrying the burden of guilt over his father leaving him and his mother when he was five years old.
After his mother's sudden death, Mark finds a bundle of letters from his father to his mother. Letters filled with love set against the landscape of his travels across the United States. Mark decides to take his father's letters, pack up his life in Melbourne and retrace his father's journey, 20 years on, hoping to find closure.
I loved that The Roadmap of Loss was set in the 1990's, no mobile phones and no GPS made road travel exciting, dangerous and often spontaneous.
Mark is a young man with an enormous chip on his shoulder; angry, abusive and sullen. Perfect characterization made me neither like or dislike him. He brought problems onto himself so there was no sympathy, which was something he didn't want anyway.
Mark reads each of his father's letters as he arrives at the next destination and in a unique writing style the chapters start again from number one after each letter.
The Roadmap of Loss is a sombre read however there are also unexpected snippets of humour that actually had me laughing.
Liam Murphy's plethora of memorable characters that come in and out of Mark's life make for entertaining reading as he travels ten thousand hard and lonely miles across America.
I never knew how the story would evolve as Mark had a low regard for his own life and often danced with the idea of ending it.
The Roadmap of Loss is an insightful exploration of grief and the restorative power of forgiveness. A great read for those that enjoy lyrical prose and literary fiction.
The Roadmap of Loss is an affecting story about loss and grieving. Liam Murphy's writing is lyrical and evokes a sense of melancholy.
Mark Ward has always struggled with his sense of self carrying the burden of guilt over his father leaving him and his mother when he was five years old.
After his mother's sudden death, Mark finds a bundle of letters from his father to his mother. Letters filled with love set against the landscape of his travels across the United States. Mark decides to take his father's letters, pack up his life in Melbourne and retrace his father's journey, 20 years on, hoping to find closure.
I loved that The Roadmap of Loss was set in the 1990's, no mobile phones and no GPS made road travel exciting, dangerous and often spontaneous.
Mark is a young man with an enormous chip on his shoulder; angry, abusive and sullen. Perfect characterization made me neither like or dislike him. He brought problems onto himself so there was no sympathy, which was something he didn't want anyway.
Mark reads each of his father's letters as he arrives at the next destination and in a unique writing style the chapters start again from number one after each letter.
The Roadmap of Loss is a sombre read however there are also unexpected snippets of humour that actually had me laughing.
Liam Murphy's plethora of memorable characters that come in and out of Mark's life make for entertaining reading as he travels ten thousand hard and lonely miles across America.
I never knew how the story would evolve as Mark had a low regard for his own life and often danced with the idea of ending it.
The Roadmap of Loss is an insightful exploration of grief and the restorative power of forgiveness. A great read for those that enjoy lyrical prose and literary fiction.
October 18, 2024
3.5 stars.
One of writing’s golden rules decrees a protagonist should change over the course of a story, learning something about himself and the world around him. A road trip, such as the one that forms the plot architecture for Liam Murphy’s debut novel The Road Map of Loss, is the perfect metaphor for this journey of self-realisation.
The protagonist in The Road Map of Loss, Mark Ward, is a twenty-something sound engineer who works in a small-time Melbourne studio producing records for small-time musicians and assorted wannabe artists. Mark harbours a lot of pent-up rage towards his father, Dylan, who up and left Mark and his mother Celeste when Mark was five. Mark’s dissatisfaction manifests in a surly attitude and an increasingly out-of-control drinking problem. Adding fuel to his fury is frustration – Mark knows little about the motivations behind his father’s betrayal and wants his mother to help him understand. On the odd occasion she does venture to open up, she defends Dylan’s actions and Mark loses his cool, sending her back into her shell.
When Celeste passes away from illness, a grieving Mark is fired for being drunk on the job. Going through his mother’s belongings with a view to selling her house, Mark finds a box of letters Dylan wrote to her after decamping from Melbourne and commencing his apparently aimless jaunt around the United States. Desperate to make sense of the resentment that has poisoned his existence, Mark flies to America, hires a rust-bucket sports car, and begins using his dad’s letters as a sort of handwritten itinerary try to comprehend his motivations.
“My father didn’t write about things that weren’t pretty,” Mark says. “He didn’t write about the traffic jams or sunburn or the mindless ticking of a million gas bowsers or the dark thoughts one has while being on the road.”
As Mark hops from bar to bar and woman to woman, leaving a string of good and generous people in his wake, one senses the apple has not fallen so far from the tree. Is he destined to follow in his father’s footsteps literally as well as figuratively?
At its core, then, The Road Map of Loss concerns a young man wrestling with daddy issues on an epic scale. The first couple of chapters have an off-kilter, trying-too-hard-to-be-literary quality, but once Murphy relaxes into his narrative groove he proves himself a gifted wordsmith indeed. He strikes a deft balance between textured visuals (some passages read like a Bill Bryson travelogue), creating entertaining set pieces, and moving the story forward, while inventive metaphorical language adds memorable highlights. Whether describing the myriad landscapes that constitute the backdrop to the novel’s restless storyline or simply blocking out action, Murphy’s prose is as smooth and rich as a good cup of coffee. And while Mark often indulges in philosophical musings, they’re seldom pretentious. This is literature, but it’s not literature of the plodding or navel-gazing variety.
Mark Ward is the angsty 1997 version of David Banner or The Littlest Hobo – he never hangs around for long – and while this prevents the narrative from stalling it’s also a weakness. Danny, a guy visiting New York for a buck’s night, befriends Mark immediately. Soon after, a group of roadies invite Mark to join their motel party. These interactions are plausible enough; a few drinks can, after all, make strangers fast friends and Mark has many drinks across the novel’s 355 pages. But when random people take an immediate liking to him again and again, in town after town, it stretches credulity. Mark’s apparently one hundred per cent strike rate in picking up women is also a little callow, more young man’s fantasy than anything resembling reality.
Perhaps more crucial, however, is that the reader knows next to nothing about Mark’s relationship with his father. Why did Dylan, a man with “one foot always out the door”, pull a disappearing act when Mark was five years old rather than five months or five days? What love was betrayed that could sustain a life-ruining rage for 20 years? Without this vital perspective, Mark’s anger seems baseless and overblown and his father’s florid letters superfluous beyond serving as a plot device.
Put simply, The Road Map of Loss is the debut novel from an author with a startling but still maturing talent. Murphy’s prose is already exquisite – many celebrated writers don’t have his skill with language or his ability to make a line flow frictionlessly through the reader’s mind while also tempting him to pause and admire its aptness, beauty or raw honesty. The characterisation, dialogue and story elements have a few rough edges, sure, but these will polish up with experience.
I have it on good authority this is not only Murphy’s first published novel, it is the first novel he ever wrote. To craft something this entertaining and thoughtful – not to mention publishable – on one’s maiden attempt is an astonishing feat, akin to a five-year-old picking up a bicycle with no training wheels and riding off across the park. Murphy signed a two-book deal with Echo Publishing, so his sophomore effort is in the pipeline. Keep an eye out for that one – it’s bound to be something remarkable.
One of writing’s golden rules decrees a protagonist should change over the course of a story, learning something about himself and the world around him. A road trip, such as the one that forms the plot architecture for Liam Murphy’s debut novel The Road Map of Loss, is the perfect metaphor for this journey of self-realisation.
The protagonist in The Road Map of Loss, Mark Ward, is a twenty-something sound engineer who works in a small-time Melbourne studio producing records for small-time musicians and assorted wannabe artists. Mark harbours a lot of pent-up rage towards his father, Dylan, who up and left Mark and his mother Celeste when Mark was five. Mark’s dissatisfaction manifests in a surly attitude and an increasingly out-of-control drinking problem. Adding fuel to his fury is frustration – Mark knows little about the motivations behind his father’s betrayal and wants his mother to help him understand. On the odd occasion she does venture to open up, she defends Dylan’s actions and Mark loses his cool, sending her back into her shell.
When Celeste passes away from illness, a grieving Mark is fired for being drunk on the job. Going through his mother’s belongings with a view to selling her house, Mark finds a box of letters Dylan wrote to her after decamping from Melbourne and commencing his apparently aimless jaunt around the United States. Desperate to make sense of the resentment that has poisoned his existence, Mark flies to America, hires a rust-bucket sports car, and begins using his dad’s letters as a sort of handwritten itinerary try to comprehend his motivations.
“My father didn’t write about things that weren’t pretty,” Mark says. “He didn’t write about the traffic jams or sunburn or the mindless ticking of a million gas bowsers or the dark thoughts one has while being on the road.”
As Mark hops from bar to bar and woman to woman, leaving a string of good and generous people in his wake, one senses the apple has not fallen so far from the tree. Is he destined to follow in his father’s footsteps literally as well as figuratively?
At its core, then, The Road Map of Loss concerns a young man wrestling with daddy issues on an epic scale. The first couple of chapters have an off-kilter, trying-too-hard-to-be-literary quality, but once Murphy relaxes into his narrative groove he proves himself a gifted wordsmith indeed. He strikes a deft balance between textured visuals (some passages read like a Bill Bryson travelogue), creating entertaining set pieces, and moving the story forward, while inventive metaphorical language adds memorable highlights. Whether describing the myriad landscapes that constitute the backdrop to the novel’s restless storyline or simply blocking out action, Murphy’s prose is as smooth and rich as a good cup of coffee. And while Mark often indulges in philosophical musings, they’re seldom pretentious. This is literature, but it’s not literature of the plodding or navel-gazing variety.
Mark Ward is the angsty 1997 version of David Banner or The Littlest Hobo – he never hangs around for long – and while this prevents the narrative from stalling it’s also a weakness. Danny, a guy visiting New York for a buck’s night, befriends Mark immediately. Soon after, a group of roadies invite Mark to join their motel party. These interactions are plausible enough; a few drinks can, after all, make strangers fast friends and Mark has many drinks across the novel’s 355 pages. But when random people take an immediate liking to him again and again, in town after town, it stretches credulity. Mark’s apparently one hundred per cent strike rate in picking up women is also a little callow, more young man’s fantasy than anything resembling reality.
Perhaps more crucial, however, is that the reader knows next to nothing about Mark’s relationship with his father. Why did Dylan, a man with “one foot always out the door”, pull a disappearing act when Mark was five years old rather than five months or five days? What love was betrayed that could sustain a life-ruining rage for 20 years? Without this vital perspective, Mark’s anger seems baseless and overblown and his father’s florid letters superfluous beyond serving as a plot device.
Put simply, The Road Map of Loss is the debut novel from an author with a startling but still maturing talent. Murphy’s prose is already exquisite – many celebrated writers don’t have his skill with language or his ability to make a line flow frictionlessly through the reader’s mind while also tempting him to pause and admire its aptness, beauty or raw honesty. The characterisation, dialogue and story elements have a few rough edges, sure, but these will polish up with experience.
I have it on good authority this is not only Murphy’s first published novel, it is the first novel he ever wrote. To craft something this entertaining and thoughtful – not to mention publishable – on one’s maiden attempt is an astonishing feat, akin to a five-year-old picking up a bicycle with no training wheels and riding off across the park. Murphy signed a two-book deal with Echo Publishing, so his sophomore effort is in the pipeline. Keep an eye out for that one – it’s bound to be something remarkable.
April 13, 2024
There are many things to enjoy about Liam Murphy’s debut novel about a troubled man, Mark Ward, who retraces his estranged father, Dylan’s, journey across America. The writing style is accomplished; the settings and locations reflect the main character’s mood as he learns more and more about a man he has hated and yearned for, his entire life. The spacing of the letters, for Mark and the reader, is a clever device to appreciate both the father’s emotional journey as well as his son’s, twenty years later. A multitude of transient characters add colour and depth to the story. Ultimately, this is a journey with the power to release Mark from his demons, if he can let go of his anger and find peace and forgiveness.
November 28, 2023
The easiest comparison for this is to “On the Road”. The protagonist, Mark, is heavily flawed, full of rage, but I empathize with him. I kept having assumptions of where this novel was going, and they were never quite right. A good pick if you like books with little snippets of other people lives.
February 11, 2024
This is a philosophical read, a novel about finding yourself (with a bit of the Wizard of Oz’s ‘you had the power all of the time’ messaging as Mark talks about searching for the great frontier). The combination of the weightier themes and Murphy’s evocative prose reflecting Mark’s physical travels across America and metaphysical journey will mean this certainly appeals to many.
3.5 stars
Read my review here: https://www.debbish.com/books-literat...
3.5 stars
Read my review here: https://www.debbish.com/books-literat...
December 20, 2023
The Roadmap of Loss by Liam Murphy is highly recommended literary fiction which explores loss, past hurts, and a search for answers.
It is 1997 in Melbourne, Australia. Mark Ward is struggling, drinking too much and torturing himself trying to deal with the death of his mother. His father, Dylan, abandoned them when Mark was five. His mother told him Dylan went to the USA and died in a car accident there. Mark remembers his parents arguing and drinking, so his memories of his father are not happy ones. He feels guilty about his father leaving and now his mother dying.
When cleaning out his mother's house Mark is shocked to find a box full of letters written by Dylan to his mother. Many of the letters were written after his supposed death as he traveled around America. In the letters Dylan honestly discusses his life, love, fears, and dreams. They portray a man quite different from the one Mark thought he knew. Dylan loved his wife and son. Mark decides to leave and go the the USA as his father did and begins a journey of his own while slowly reading the letters.
The Roadmap of Loss is a well-written classic road trip novel. Seemingly Mark aimlessly travels around the USA, but he is also in many ways retracing the journey his father took. As he journeys through a foreign country in a wreck-of-a-car, he is drinking too much and meeting a wide variety of people along the way. He may be searching for answers, but he is really facing his own loneliness, disbelief, and failings while on what appears to be the road to his own self destruction - unless he can find the way to forgiveness and peace he is desperately seeking.
Mark is definitely portrayed as a fully realized, believable character. Even while he is making poor choices and bad decisions, readers will be rooting for him to find peace and some sense of how he can move on and make a life for himself. This is a good choice for those who like road-trip novels involving flawed characters seeking closure.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Echo Publishing via NetGalley.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2023/1...
It is 1997 in Melbourne, Australia. Mark Ward is struggling, drinking too much and torturing himself trying to deal with the death of his mother. His father, Dylan, abandoned them when Mark was five. His mother told him Dylan went to the USA and died in a car accident there. Mark remembers his parents arguing and drinking, so his memories of his father are not happy ones. He feels guilty about his father leaving and now his mother dying.
When cleaning out his mother's house Mark is shocked to find a box full of letters written by Dylan to his mother. Many of the letters were written after his supposed death as he traveled around America. In the letters Dylan honestly discusses his life, love, fears, and dreams. They portray a man quite different from the one Mark thought he knew. Dylan loved his wife and son. Mark decides to leave and go the the USA as his father did and begins a journey of his own while slowly reading the letters.
The Roadmap of Loss is a well-written classic road trip novel. Seemingly Mark aimlessly travels around the USA, but he is also in many ways retracing the journey his father took. As he journeys through a foreign country in a wreck-of-a-car, he is drinking too much and meeting a wide variety of people along the way. He may be searching for answers, but he is really facing his own loneliness, disbelief, and failings while on what appears to be the road to his own self destruction - unless he can find the way to forgiveness and peace he is desperately seeking.
Mark is definitely portrayed as a fully realized, believable character. Even while he is making poor choices and bad decisions, readers will be rooting for him to find peace and some sense of how he can move on and make a life for himself. This is a good choice for those who like road-trip novels involving flawed characters seeking closure.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Echo Publishing via NetGalley.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2023/1...
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June 17, 2024When I read the final sentence of this intriguing and often thought-provoking debut novel by Liam Murphy, I found myself completely unbelieving. After a feast of deft and thoughtful story-telling, and the metaphor of Mark Ward (his protagonist) letting go of of his father's hold over him via his long lost letters to his mother "as they took in salty water" at the California coast, the author could only manage to describe the Santa Monica sunset as "nicer than [he'd] ever imagined."
Really? "Nicer"?
After that shock, I wasn't sure anymore that what had come before was from the same writer.
In addition,I found the plot a little contrived at times, episodic, like a series of short stories. Nevertheless, the sheer pig-headedness to which Mark habitually reverted had me caught.
I would have liked to understand a little more of what turned in Mark during his pivotal stay with Jack and Diane. It seems all it took was an arduous trek into and out of the Grand Canyon. Another metaphor, perhaps.
However, I certainly recommend a read.
Really? "Nicer"?
After that shock, I wasn't sure anymore that what had come before was from the same writer.
In addition,I found the plot a little contrived at times, episodic, like a series of short stories. Nevertheless, the sheer pig-headedness to which Mark habitually reverted had me caught.
I would have liked to understand a little more of what turned in Mark during his pivotal stay with Jack and Diane. It seems all it took was an arduous trek into and out of the Grand Canyon. Another metaphor, perhaps.
However, I certainly recommend a read.
March 16, 2024
Honest characters, compelling setting
THE ROADMAP OF LOSS by Liam Murphy combines the adventure of the travel story with the heartache of the family drama. The characters are so real that the novel reads like a memoir, while the tightly written plot moves seamlessly between past and present. I particularly liked the epistolary aspects of the novel, how the letters hold the story together, and how well the author captures the spirit of each place.
This captivating story with its conflicted protagonist draws in the reader from beginning to end.
THE ROADMAP OF LOSS by Liam Murphy combines the adventure of the travel story with the heartache of the family drama. The characters are so real that the novel reads like a memoir, while the tightly written plot moves seamlessly between past and present. I particularly liked the epistolary aspects of the novel, how the letters hold the story together, and how well the author captures the spirit of each place.
This captivating story with its conflicted protagonist draws in the reader from beginning to end.
March 19, 2024
I fear I did not find this engaging; an unlikeable protagonist and a writing style that I found hard to read. I could not struggle throiugh it and must say that for me this was a rare DNF. I guess I am not the target reader! Thankyou to the publisher and NetGalley for a Digital ARC.
June 7, 2024
The Roadmap of Loss - is more of a quest, where Mark Ward attempts to reconstruct his own fathers journey across USA - far from his Melbourne home in Australia, he meets and is assisted by many along the way - learning more about himself as he heals from the loss of his mother and absent father.
February 5, 2024
3.5 - 4.
I enjoyed the roadtrip and the 'quest for answers', but (and it may have been me!) I feel there was a lack of clarity along the way.
I enjoyed the roadtrip and the 'quest for answers', but (and it may have been me!) I feel there was a lack of clarity along the way.
March 18, 2024
3 1/2 stars
March 30, 2024
A beautifully written story about a man searching for answers.
June 7, 2024
Enjoyed elements of this, nice premise for a story- some v sexist descriptions of women/sec that jarred a bit!
September 19, 2024
A good read left me with a question though
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews