By Gail Caldwell
Random House | 208pgs
Release Date: August 10, 2010

Summary:
Pulitzer Prize winning critic Gail Caldwell writes a deeply touching testament to her best friend in Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship. Caldwell and fellow writer Caroline Knapp (Drinking: A Love Story) shared an intensely close connection, and when Knapp was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in April of 2002, the pair shared Knapp’s struggle in the final days of her life. The women had come into this valuable friendship in mid-life. They met in Boston and quickly bonded over their mutual love of dogs, active lifestyles and past struggles with alcoholism. Neither were married, and turned to each other for advice, companionship and emotional support. Caldwell openly discusses Knapp’s decline in health and death two months after the diagnosis, as a way to deal with her grief and memorialize their friendship by sharing their story.

What critics are saying:
Gail Caldwell worked for The Boston Globe for over twenty years as a staff writer and chief book critic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 2001. Critics have been truly moved by the author’s poignant memoir of friendship. “Caldwell has managed to do the inexpressible in this quiet, fierce work: create a memorable offering of love to her best friend, Caroline Knapp… [and] is unflinching in depicting her friend’s last days, although her own grief nearly undid her; she writes of this desolating time with tremendously moving grace,” declares Publishers Weekly

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