Recipient of fifteen prizes and honors, As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back is a girl-and-her-backpack story with a #MeToo framing set in S.E. Asia and Japan in the late 1980s.

She learned to leave herself long before she ever left home.

By seventeen, Carlie has stolen money from the father who stole everything from her, boarded a plane, and vanished entirely into the backpacker trails of Southeast Asia. New country. New name. No forwarding address.

But running only gets you so far. Across the beaches of Thailand, the streets of Tokyo, and every guesthouse in between, she is still carrying what she left. The body keeps its own records, even when the mind goes somewhere else.

As the months blur into a life built from nothing, Carlie discovers that surviving and living are not the same thing. The road is raw and fractured and at times darkly funny, filled with people who help and hurt in equal measure.

Then someone says three words to her, and everything cracks open.

Urgent and lyrical, unflinching and achingly human, this is a story for anyone who has ever had to leave themselves to survive, and dared to wonder if coming back was still possible.

She mastered the art of leaving. The hardest lesson was learning how to stay. Get your copy today before the price changes.

About the Author

Alle C. Hall is an author, speaker, and writing instructor whose work focuses on the joy and creativity resulting from trauma recovery. With 35+ years of healing from childhood abuse, Alle was sober for 27 years, had one bastard of a slip, and has been sober since then. She is in even longer-term recovery from compulsive overeating and bulimia, as well as sexual anorexia. Hall's debut novel, As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back, has been honored fifteen times since publication. Her award-winning fiction and essays appear in Dale Peck's Evergreen Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Litro, New World Writing, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Her journalism can be read in Bust Magazine, The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger, for whom she was a contributing writer. Hall lives in Seattle with her much-loved husband and two, shining sons.

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