For Sandy Rivers, the known world is the suburban landscape of his morning paper route, an intimate if unsteady place where the illusions of comfort, sanctuary and myth are shattered by daily headlines that chronicle a country torn by war in Vietnam,  the struggle for Civil Rights and the search for national purpose.

It’s the spring of 1968. Belief in American providence is clashing with the limits of American might. During the next breathtaking year, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated, Richard Nixon goes to the White House and Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.

For a heartland community of aging Buicks and loblolly pines on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, the racial fault line is a bamboo grove at the edge of a honeysuckle swamp. The contest for the soul of the nation plays itself out in Sunday sermons and over lingering suppers of hot biscuits and slaw. And the messenger for national promise and peril is Sandy, who delivers the news, the good with the bad, on a mission he takes on each day before dawn.

While Sandy confronts the growing pains of a new job and his first love, his papers reveal a nation grappling with its own adolescence and the epic foibles and fortunes that brings. Helping him sort it all out is a mysterious figure with a tragic secret who both challenges the boy and stands by him as Sandy confronts a staggering loss.

This is a story of friendship. This is a story of hope. It's the story of an era that helped shape our country and define our times, told through one boy's extraordinary journey through his own small patch of America. And it’s the story of a debt he can never repay to someone he knows only as The Bicycle Man.