Is A Long Way Home Based On A True Story Or Fiction?

Question

Heard A Long Way Home might be true, but the plot feels novel-like. Anyone confirm if it's based on real events or original fiction?

fhivy30 rauf · Answer

'A Long Way Home' is a true story which was adapted into the movie 'Lion' and so for a fictional take on a man returning to his roots I recently read ‘My Last Walk Home’. The story follows a man who returns to his home along a railway line and mixes the present with his childhood memories in a real and ground melancholy story full of mystery and nostalgia.

Mila · Answer

A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley is a true memoir of a young boy who traveled from India to Australia as a child and then, using Google Earth and satellite imagery, found his long lost birth family decades later. The famous memoir was made into a movie called Lion. Although the movie is dramatised for storytelling purposes, it remains true to the authors’ real life events.

There are other works which are purely fictional and have the same title. However, I find it fascinating to note that for me, there is no other work called “A Long Way Home” than the memoir of a real person. Saroo Brierley’s book is very magnetic for me, because it is a very real and stranger than fiction story of a real person, and that is what stayed with me long after I finished reading his book.

Quincy · Answer

I assume you are talking about different versions. To answer briefly, I think the most well known ‘A Long Way Home’ is the memoir of Saroo Brierley, a true story of a child who was lost and ended up in Australia to be adopted, and years later found his birth family with the aid of Google Earth. The book is more interior than the movie, covering the same basic ground but with more reflection.

Other books titled A Long Way Home are largely fictional. This depends on the specific work and how it is promoted by the author i.e. as a novel or as a memoir. This work of non-fiction has had a strong impact on me as it explores how technology and dogged determination can lead to a person being re-united with their family. My recollection of the story by the author, Saroo Brierley, gets a lump in my throat, even now, as I recall his wonderful reunion with his family.

Ruby · Answer

So, as I said earlier, context matters. By ‘A Long Way Home’ I assume you mean the Saroo Brierley memoir, not some other work of fiction with the same title. And the answer is a resounding true. The memoir recounts Brierley’s separation from his family at the age of five and his subsequent growth into man and his ‘reunion’ with his Indian family via satellite imagery many years later. This is a very powerful true story and has become a sort of touchstone for discussions about memory, identity and the role of technology in changing our lives.

However, there are many other books called “A Long Way Home” and, although they contain real-life themes and situations, they are not factual and are novel(s), film(s) and play(s). These could be works of fiction that contain real-life situations and people to drive home a particular point or to bring home an emotional situation. If in doubt check if the book is described as a memoir or as a novel, because the majority of autobiographical accounts, such as this author’s work, are clearly labeled as being written by the author and detail their own personal experiences. The real-life story of how this author managed to use satellite images to find his long lost home is amazing in itself, showing how one small persistent action can change a life forever.

Faith · Answer

This novel has been discussed at a literary meet-up and people were even wondering if this was a true story or not. This novel is written by the man himself, Saroo Brierley, and it is about his childhood, when he got lost and then adopted, and then found his Indian family when he was 25. There is even documentation of his story by means of adoption records, interviews etc etc. The movie “Lion” is even a cinematic adaptation of this novel, and as with any movie, they took some parts of his life and put them into key scenes, but this is definitely real.

One of the things that struck me so much about this book was how memory is documented. So the author’s memories of trains and stations are all his, subjective, but within the larger true facts of his life, a really interesting read of a human story, with technology as a part of it, and identity. It was a really good memoir and it’s one of those rare books that is really intimate, but also kind of cinematic. It really stuck with me.

Miles · Answer

This ‘A Long Way Home’ is a memoir by Saroo Brierley. After being left to his own devices as a young child in India and traveling hundreds of miles to find his way back home, Saroo was eventually adopted by an Australian family and later used Google Earth to search for his long lost family. The story is real, and has been documented thoroughly, largely because of its very modern twist.

So many books have the same title, it can get rather confusing as to whether the book is fictional or not. But no, when people mention the story of Saroo Brierley’s search for his biological family, they are referring to nonfiction. The film ‘Lion’ was a brilliant way to bring the memoir to more people’s attention. Although the film ‘Lion’ altered some of the timelines to make the emotional journey more immediate to the viewer, the core of the story is true to Saroo Brierley’s life and that’s what blew me away and left me with a strange sense of upliftment.

Braxton · Answer

I picked up ‘A Long Way Home’ because it felt like a dusty old map had been uncovered and suddenly all the pieces fell into place. The majority of people who read this book will have read Saroo Brierley’s memoir of the same name and will know the true story of the little boy who was left to his own devices after being torn from his family in India. He was eventually adopted by an Australian couple and spent decades of his life trying to find his roots before eventually using satellite imagery to discover his birthplace, decades after he had left.

You may also be familiar with the film ‘Lion’ which is based on Saroo’s book. The film is a dramatized version of the book which means some events have been condensed or changed to aid the story line. The core of the book is the same as the film, though. It is a beautifully written account of identity, memory and how a man can spend decades of his life trying to piece together his past before finally using a simple satellite map to retrace his steps to find his roots.

Liam · Answer

I get excited when people ask me about ‘A Long Way Home’ because the title refers to so many books, but the most popular one is Saroo Brierley’s true memoir of his life as a young boy who traveled to India and got lost, then was adopted by an Australian family and spent decades searching for his Indian birth family using Google Earth. The memoir is nonfiction which is so raw and real. You get to experience all of the emotions, the culture shock, and the years of searching all first hand. He recounts all of the details so vividly in the book.

The true story of Saroo Brierley was also made into a film called ‘Lion’. While the memoir is a non-fiction work the author wrote himself and is therefore raw and real, the film is a dramatization of the story, which means that some scenes have been condensed or altered in order to fit the narrative into a two-hour film. If you read the memoir first then watch the film Lion you will notice differences, but the core of the story remains the same: a young boy is lost in India and eventually ends up with an Australian family. Many years later he searches for his true family.

Yes there are other works of the same title, including several novels. But ‘A Long Way Home’ by Saroo Brierley is his true account of his life as a young child lost in India and adopted by an Australian family, and his search for his true family twenty five years later. His book is fascinating and gets under your skin.

Steffie Ridpath · Answer

Let's get this over with. I've already stated that this is fiction. But I'm happy to discuss why I feel that it is true. To me, the truth of this story is in the very mundane details of this man's struggles to survive in a world that has been ravaged by disaster on a global scale. Yes, there are mutants and natural disasters that he must fight against, but most of the time he's just struggling with the same types of problems that we all face on a daily basis: blisters, bad luck, the monotony of walking day in and day out. His encounters with other human beings are far more believable and interesting than the actual disaster that caused this world to fall apart. He meets people who are kind and help him along the way, and he meets people who would kill him for a can of beans. The full spectrum of human behavior is on full display in this protagonist and it feels very researched and very observed, as opposed to having been created out of thin air.

Lamittan Minsah · Answer

I was speaking about a novel earlier. The novel is very good at exposing our deepest anxieties. Instead of interviewing someone who has gone through a similar experience to that described in the novel, the author must have studied how people survive, how societies collapse, and how we hold on to hope. He must have then created the worst possible scenario to test all of this. I already described this to you. It is a simulation, using real data inputs (human nature, physics, geography), hypothetical scenario, and very engrossing story. It’s tomorrow’s ghost story. It’s a novel. It could be a documentary from the future, but it’s not. It’s a very good story.

Saji Francis · Answer

I read this in the dark of a long power outage after a big storm. It was a very similar mood to the book, let me tell you. Every creak of the house sounded like a threat, and my flashlight beam felt like the most important thing in the world. A book of this sort is a mirror. How realistic it feels to you depends somewhat on what you bring to the book. So long as you’ve ever felt lost, vulnerable, threatened, or desperate to reach safety, the story of this book will hook into your memories of those times and make them feel far worse than they did. For me, reading this book in that very dark and quiet house felt true because my own reality was temporarily that of a threatened and endangered character, and I was reading about his threatened and endangered state. Context is everything.

Laurentius Bansing · Answer

The prose is highly immersive. It’s written in close third person and follows the protagonist’s senses as well as his thoughts. We see what he sees and feel what he feels. Unlike a true story that would be narrated in an omniscient, journalistic style and give a broad view of a global crisis, instead we are given a very narrow and gritty view of one man’s confused experience of events. His limited knowledge and fear of the unknown are paramount in his response to crisis and this is how we respond too – often in the dark. The prose achieves a ‘true story’ feel largely through this style.

ObsessedInk_writer · Answer

This question comes up so often in book clubs (which is to say, it’s a huge compliment to the author to even consider they wrote a story that feels THIS urgent and believable enough to wonder if it’s been pulled straight from the current headlines). For Riddle’s ‘The Long Way Home’, the answer is no. It is an entirely original work of fiction. What he does masterfully, however, is anchor all of his sci-fi concepts in supremely relatable, mundane details – the weight of a backpack full of kit, the ache in your soles, the white noise of static on a dead radio. It makes absolute sense that you, a totally normal, blimey-nothing person, could be doing exactly this in order to survive an event that isn’t even real. And the deepest fears, and highest pedestals of determination, and the absolute logistical nightmare of it all? Totally real, and just one of the tricks of very good speculative fiction.

Henny Safrini · Answer

Yes, okay. But then imagine if this were really happening. How awful would that be? Yet this scenario is so easily imaginable and wouldn’t be dependent on zombies or aliens in order to be chilling. It’s based on ‘truth’. In this case the ‘truth’ of the story is the trajectory of our technology-dependent culture. It asks the one serious question about our current situation: what if the thread we’re hanging by were to snap? Yes, the characters and the plot are all fictional but the anxiety, the fear of this happening is 100% genuine. It is of our time. It is plucked straight from the zeitgeist and given a face and a name.

Is A Long Way Home Based On A True Story Or Fiction?

14 Answers

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