Cleo: A Novel - Tapa dura

"I left home because of something I read in a book from a lending library in Robina. This is how it went: 'I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the unknown.' Miss Emma Hawkins - who treated those books as if they were fertile eggs and she was the last setting hen in Robina County - always had something special waiting for me. That Saturday it was My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel."
Thus young Cleo, inspired by her book, heads toward the largest nearby city, Tulsa, and begins to work her way toward Lhasa. It's the twenties, so the going is slow. Over the decades she will begin a family and lose it, fall in love unwisely again, return to rural Oklahoma to aid her Bible-thumping mother and free-spirited grandmother, and begin a business of her own. Always, though, her bags are packed for Lhasa and her eyes are on the bright horizon.