A man may come back to the place he left and still be a long way from home.
This is the book of his return. It begins far out, in winter, on the wrong side of an ocean, and it does not hurry. A man who has gone as far as Olav Hestby has gone does not come back in a season; the way home runs through ships he would not have chosen and ports he never meant to see, through one year and the next, and he is changed by the length of it.
What he is sailing toward has not stood still and waited for him. And there is a part of the returning that no ship completes—a thing he will carry up from the boat and over his own threshold and not set down, because he has not been given, in any language he has, the word for what it is.
This is the long return.