The Long Way Home: Stories in Bloomington, MN

Ron Lands writes beautiful stories about the messy life of sickness, death, loss, confusion, and compassion. In his work, his two worlds of doctor and writer seamlessly overlap. Most of the men and women who populate these stories are facing the end—either their own, or someone else's— and the medical, practical, emotional, and spiritual complexities that develop in the final hours and days intertwine to create moving and memorable conflicts between, and within, the characters.
These stories take place in the homes, doctor's offices, and hospital rooms of a small Tennessee town, where doctors intimately know their patients, and patients exist in a generational no-mans' land between house calls and contemporary medicine. As doctor and writer Lands' ability to explore their humanity as his characters navigate the unfamiliar makes these stories shimmer. Beautifully rendered sentence after sentence, THE LONG WAY HOMEThe is the work of an expert in his fields. —Susan Perabo