Have you ever been a child lost in a department store, looking for your mother, panicking and wondering how you are ever going to get home again? This feeling of rising fear inside a child who does not know where they are but finds themselves horribly and interminably alone is magnified one hundred fold in Saroo Brierly's autobiography, A Long Way Home; it tells the story of a five year old Brerly lost in rural India, wondering where he was, and where he was going to end up, before he was adopted by a wealthy Australian family. Twenty five years later, he begins to search for his Indian family, wanting to find out once and for all who he really was and where it was that he had come from. He begins his search by finding his hometown on Google Earth.
As well as being an autobiographical work, the book also touches on subjects such as Third World poverty, survival and the struggle to find one's true identity.
In 2016, Garth Davis directed the big screen adaptation of the book. Lion premiered at the 2016 International Film Festival and starred Nicole Kidman, Dev Patel and Rooney Mara, earning Patel an Academy Award nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category.
Brierly announced in 2019 that he was searching for his birth father, a man of unknown whereabouts, who had left the family when he was an infant.
