There’s nothing like a road trip to sort things out, talk things out and figure things out.

Miles and miles of miles and miles provide time and space to reflect, refresh and review, as well as opportunities to confront new experiences and new people.

For writers, road trips have long been a useful device.

From the westward Dust Bowl migration of “The Grapes of Wrath” to John Steinbeck rolling across America with his pet poodle in “Travels with Charley,” the road has beckoned storytellers.

Now comes Roger Mourad Jr., an Ann Arbor resident raised in Grosse Pointe. With a grown son in Chicago (and another in New York), he is fully familiar with the trek across I-94.

The ribbon of highway from Detroit’s East Side to the Windy City provides the setting for “two older dudes” and their emotional evolution in “Road Trip to the Future.” The novel tells an offbeat, often amusing, “on the road” story of two men who reconnect to search for a missing mutual friend.

En route, Mourad said, the men debate “racial politics and related social issues,” while experiencing “comedic, bizarre and colorful characters and mishaps.”

For Mourad, the Michigan backdrop, with mentions of Macomb County, taps childhood memories of racial disparities between Detroit and Grosse Pointe. From that starting point, he said, the novel “challenges assumptions about what it means to live in a just society.”

“As a kid, it seemed there was a binary divide,” with Alter Road separating the Pointes from Detroit, said Mourad.

“Nobody talked about it, except obliquely. We didn’t talk about it, but it was palpable.”

Still, growing up Catholic and attending the Star of the Sea Catholic School, Mourad said he learned much from a priest whose “from the heart” sermons addressed social conscience and discrimination.

A 1976 of Grosse Pointe North High School, Mourad’s familiarity with Detroit and Michigan is prominent in “Road Trip,” as his two characters make their way west in, fittingly, an old, “clunky” Pontiac LeMans that had been garage-kept.

“It’s meant to have a certain irony,” he said. “LeMans is an endurance race, after all.”

The book is Mourad’s first novel, but not his first published work. A lawyer with four degrees from the University of Michigan, he has been widely published internationally in professional journals from Great Britain and South Africa to Australia. Much of his written work flowed from his experience as director of Institutional Research for Washtenaw Community College and other schools.

And, he said, his novel was influenced by his education in philosophy, as well as his appreciation for French historian Michel Foucault, whose work examined liberty, knowledge, authority, racial prejudice and social structure.

In “Road Trip to the Future,” Mourad said, societal questions that surfaced in his youth are addressed.

“I carried that into my adulthood,” he said, adding that while the idea for the book percolated for years, he began working on it in 2011.

“I wrote it because I really felt compelled to write it.” “Road Trip” is available in paperback for $14.99 from Amazon.