Sign-In
Cart
The Long Way
Paperback
Series: Department of Small Wonders, Book 1
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 30 2026
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Some places you're supposed to drive past. Miles Donovan was raised to stop.
Miles is forty-six, spectacularly unpublished, and nursing a hangover in Key West when a stranger presses a postcard into his hand - one that's been carried for fifteen years. A roadside pizzeria somewhere up the map, and a single line scrawled across the back:
DON'T DRIVE PAST THIS ONE.
Signed with a single letter. B.
He should throw it away. Instead he points the car north.
What follows is the long way - a meandering, hand-drawn route through the parts of America that don't make the brochure: fireworks stands and bait shops, a woman who keeps her late husband's things in a back room, a town that would rather you kept driving. Miles is looking for the man who signed the card. What he finds is a knot of small, quiet wonders - and one secret somebody buried on a mountain road with no guardrail.
Warm, funny, and quietly devastating, The Long Way is a novel about noticing: the people we're taught to drive past, and what it costs to finally stop.
Book One of the Department of Small Wonders.
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback