In riveresque prose, Ron Lands carries us with fearless grace over the eddies and jutting rocks of lives in small-town Tennessee. We are in our very own homes in these stories, but in the metaphorical attics and basements-places that lights are too often kept turned off. The Long Way Home surely offers a sense of place, but more than that, invites us to reconsider how we navigate what's found there: the breathing of lives lived, lives lost, our own mirrors of life and death. I salute the hard craft of these stories, the earned victory-the further you delve into them, the more they become your own.

-Timothy Dodd