A charming, hilarious, and heart-wrenching epistolary novel about a dysfunctional family struggling to love and accept each other--and a Jewish pig farmer in Israel. As droll as it is deeply moving, Holy Lands chronicles a set of highly charged relationships within an estranged if wonderfully colorful and committed family of eccentrics: Harry Rosenmerck, an aging Jewish cardiologist who leaves his thriving medical practice to raise anti-terrorist pigs in Israel; David, his gay son, an earnest and successful playwright in New York whose letters to his disapproving father go long unanswered; Annabelle, Harry’s daughter, who flees New York when her heart is suddenly and unexpectedly broken; and their mother, (and Harry’s ex-wife) Monique, who ruminates about their once happy marriage even as she quietly strives to survive an aggressive lethal cancer. Holy Lands captures the distress and poignancy of an adult family striving to remain connected across time, geography, and radically different perspectives on life.