Below is the complete list of Richard Paul Evans’ Broken Road books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Broken Road Books
About Broken Road
Richard Paul Evans’s Broken Road series is a three-book inspirational saga about Charles James, a highly successful Chicago advertising executive whose outward prosperity conceals a life increasingly disconnected from the values and relationships that once mattered to him. Beginning with The Broken Road, continuing through The Forgotten Road, and concluding with The Road Home, the trilogy follows Charles after an unexpected brush with death gives him the opportunity to disappear from his established life and reconsider how he reached it.
Charles has built his career by mastering persuasion. He understands ambition, appearances, and the mechanics of selling people what they believe they want, and those abilities have made him wealthy. Yet professional achievement has come with compromises. His marriage has failed, important relationships have been neglected, and the relentless pursuit of success has left him with little sense that the life surrounding him actually belongs to the person he once intended to become.
The Broken Road moves between Charles’s present crisis and the experiences that formed him. Evans traces his path from a difficult childhood through early adulthood, love, work, and the decisions that gradually reshape his ambitions. The retrospective structure matters because Charles cannot change simply by abandoning his career. He first has to understand the sequence of choices, injuries, and rationalizations that brought him to the point where losing everything can feel less frightening than returning to it.
A reported plane disaster gives Charles an extraordinary circumstance: the world believes he has died. Instead of immediately correcting that assumption, he accepts the anonymity and begins traveling west. His destination and the road itself become opportunities to live without the identity created by his wealth and professional reputation.
The Forgotten Road develops that journey as Charles follows the historic Route 66 toward California. Unlike Alan Christoffersen’s cross-country walk in Evans’s earlier Walk series, Charles’s journey is not primarily about physical endurance. It is about memory and moral reckoning. Places associated with his earlier life force him to confront people he hurt, responsibilities he abandoned, and versions of himself he would prefer to forget.
The people he encounters along the way repeatedly challenge the idea that redemption can be achieved privately. Regret may begin with self-examination, but repairing a life requires acknowledging the effect one’s choices had on other people. Charles discovers that apology does not guarantee forgiveness and that returning to an old relationship cannot restore it to what it was before.
The Road Home brings the trilogy toward its central question: after dismantling the identity that made him successful but unhappy, what kind of life can Charles actually build? The final stage turns increasingly toward reconciliation, responsibility, and the possibility of using his abilities differently. Home becomes less a geographic destination than a measure of whether he can live honestly with what he has learned.
The trilogy shares several concerns with Evans’s other journey-centered fiction—grief, faith, forgiveness, second chances, and strangers whose stories alter a traveler’s perspective—but Charles is distinct from his other protagonists because much of his suffering arises from choices he participated in making. His road is therefore not simply a path away from tragedy. It is an attempt to take responsibility for the person he became.
The three novels form one continuous narrative and should be read sequentially. Together they move from collapse through remembrance to reconstruction, using the American road as the setting for a man learning that success can be abandoned quickly, while becoming worthy of a second chance is a much longer journey.