A Long Way Home Themes

A Long Way Home tells the story of Saroo Brierley, an Australian man who was adopted from India when he was a child. At five years old, Saroo boarded a train from his hometown in rural India with his older brother, Guddu. Due to a misunderstanding, Saroo ended up taking a solo 24-hour journey all the way to Calcutta, where he spent weeks begging and living on the streets before being taken into…

After Mum and Dad adopt five-year-old Saroo, he is secretly meticulous about regularly running through his memories of his family in India, his terrifying experience on the train to Calcutta, and the weeks he spent begging there, all in case it ever becomes possible for him to use his memories to reconnect with his birth family. However, even before his adoption, while he's at the orphanage in Calcutta, Saroo discovers that his memory isn't…

At its heart, Saroo's memoir is a story of kindness—his narration lingers on people who were kind to him as a child in Khandwa, while roaming the streets of Calcutta, and then his adoptive parents in Australia. Because of these kind people who made his survival and later successes possible, Saroo positions his memoir as a meditation on the positive effects of small and large kindnesses. He overwhelmingly asserts that he and other fortunate…

Though Saroo asserts that being raised outside of the Hindu religion he was born into means that he grew up believing that fate and destiny aren't actually real, he does take great pains to acknowledge moments when destiny appears to have been at work throughout his life. Personally, Saroo is much more invested in a belief in chance and luck rather than divine destiny, believing essentially that events in his life are the result of…