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The Long Road sets thirteen stories in a world too often less than kind. A world which includes Butte, Montana and New York's Hudson River Valley, a Manhattan apartment and a Florida airport, a small college town in Pennsylvania and a hospice in New England. The characters are affluent and poor, young and older, black and white, married and widowed, immigrant and long bred American. For some, their regrets and the burden of their haunting histories are too great; but more often Cote allows for hope, for the everyday of carrying-on. Her twists and turns, and surprise, add a suspense to both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances; and carefully crafted, layered metaphors -- as exemplified in the cover story of a man and a woman, and a dog and a kitten, walking the long road to divorce -- bring a surreal quality to this debut collection.