In 1986, when the boy who would soon acquire the name Saroo Brierley was five years old, he lost his way. Separated from his fourteen-year-old brother, Guddu, whose watch he was meant to be under, he mistakenly boarded a train bound for Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the Khandwa rail station in central India, and rode it for more than a day.

It is a miracle that as a tiny, timid boy with no education, he survived on the polluted, congested, poverty-stricken city streets with absolutely no support over a period of weeks. After being found by a kind stranger who delivered him to an orphanage, he was adopted by an Australian couple – the Brierleys – and grew up in Tasmania, an island state just south of the Australian continent.

Fast-forward nearly twenty-five years to 2011, when Saroo (christened Sheru, Hindi for "lion") found his hometown on Google Earth. In 2012, he was reunited with his birth mother living near Khandwa, and the world was drawn into his incredible story, now contained in A Long Way Home, a riveting and eye-opening memoir written straight from the heart.

When her youngest son disappeared, Saroo's mother's inability to distribute "child missing" posters wasn’t due solely to a lack of funds for printing. The family was so poor that no photos existed at all – no one in their lives owned a camera. As an adult, Saroo couldn't remember the name of his hometown, yet somehow he found his biological family after eight months of intensive street-by-street searching of Google Earth. Through this "repetitive, forensic," sometimes "claustrophic" exercise driven by a mixture of hazy childhood memories and crystal-clear instinct, he realizes:

"Just as my search for my mother had in some ways shaped my life, her faith that I was alive had shaped hers. She couldn’t search, but she did the next best thing: She stayed still. In conversation, I had wondered why she was still living in [the neighborhood of] Ganesh Talai, when she could have gone to Burhanpur and lived with [my brother] Kallu and his wife. She replied that she wanted to stay near the house she had been living in when I disappeared, so that if I ever returned, I would be able to find her."

Saroo's story of being lost and finding his way back home is extreme for its literal, tangible truths, but in many ways, he tells a story that belongs to all of us. "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time," writes T.S. Eliot in the final installment of his Four Quartets, published in 1942.

Whether it involves traversing continents, or going deep inside to a place accessible only by courage and faith, we each have our own way to explore. "The strength of my mother's maternal instincts – her belief that I hadn't died and that I would someday return – seems to me now one of the most incredible aspects of this whole story," Saroo writes. By watching the video below and immersing yourself in his book, you'll grow to understand so much more about his journey, and your own.