"The Tender Land" is a love story unlike any other. In her remarkable debut, Kathleen Finneran renders powerfully the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain of family relationships--their closeness and disconnection, their intimacy and estrangement, and their ultimate resilience. The Finnerans--parents and five children--are a seemingly ordinary family until their lives are forever altered by the death of the author's younger brother. His suicide at fifteen serves as a focal point for Finneran's spare and elegant portrait of her family, its sorrows and its joys. "With subtlety and grace and a heartbraking compassion for the truth" (Book), Finneran pays tribute to the enduring love between parents and children, brothers and sisters.