An autobiographical novel by Coke Newell

WINNER OF THE YEAR'S BEST NOVEL FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR MORMON LETTERS AND THE WHITNEY AWARDS

From the author of Latter Days: A Guided Tour Through Six Billion Years of Mormonism comes this exuberant and groundbreaking autobiographical novel about the modern Mormon convert experience. Revealing the author's hard-won path to meaning, faith, and forgiveness, On the Road to Heaven is a love story about a girl and a guy and their search for heaven—a lotta love, a little heaven, and one heck of a ride in between.

In a style reminiscent of and offering homage to Jack Kerouac, On the Road to Heaven traces an LSD-to-LDS pilgrimage across the geographic and cultural landscape of two continents in the late twentieth century. From the 1970s hippie heyday of the Colorado mountains to the coca fields of Colombia, it's a journey through Thoreau ascetics, Ram Dass Taoism, and Edward Abbey monkey-wrenching to the mission fields of one of the world's fastest-growing—and most trenchantly conservative—religions.

Few stories have ever described a more unusual road to redemption.

"I have never read such a gripping story of conversion and missionary labor. It held me fast partly because of the winsome romance mixed into the story of a mountain hippie who finds life's meaning in Mormonism. But the gritty descriptions of friendship and adventure in the Colorado wilderness and of missionaries working the mean streets of Colombia are enthralling in themselves. The candid view of the vicissitudes of a spiritual life will startle readers accustomed to more staid narratives."
—Richard Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Trade paperback
348 pages
ISBN 978-0-9787971-3-3