Nick Blake has just returned from the battlefields of Europe and is part of a lost generation trying to make its way in postwar America. As he sets out on a journey across the country, the summer of 1947 comes alive in a mind-bending, history-altering romp. Nick witnesses the birth of electric blues in Chicago, encounters the first members of the Beat Generation taking to the road, gets caught up with the original motorcycle gang invading small-town America, and is party to the first sightings of UFOs across the Midwestern skies. Along the way, he encounters a young Muddy Waters, an even...

In 1971, fed up with the politics and culture of America, Terry Tarnoff packed a bag, a guitar and sixteen harmonicas and headed out on an eight year journey that would take him into the jungles of Africa, the mountains of India and beyond. Smoking a chillum around a funeral pyre with lepers, battling fist size cockroaches in Mombasa Africa or driving through the poppy fields of Thailand with a kamikaze cab driver, each adventure leads Terry further into worlds unlike those he has ever known. Through an eclectic coterie of like minded expatriates-from a heroin junkie in Bangkok to the girl of...