“Though painstaking in its historical detail (without succumbing to the obsessive’s need to show off) In the Distance has the feel of a very contemporary story, capturing as it does the struggle and the will at the heart of migration, along with the cruelties that inevitably surround it.” - Lit Hub, “The 20 Best Novels of the Decade” This suspenseful novel is a potent depiction of loneliness, a memorable immigration narrative, and a canny reinvention of the old-school western." - Publishers Weekly, Top 10 Books of 2017 The result is a singular and deeply affecting portrait of one man’s life in a rapidly changing world, unlike any old-school or revisionist western I’ve experienced." -Carys Davies, The Guardian One of the many delights of In the Distance, which was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer prize in the US, is the way the writing oscillates between the austere and the lyrical, the realistic and the dream-like. " A page-turning adventure story that’s also a profound meditation on solitude and companionship, foreignness and home a bildungsroman in the grand 19th-century tradition that is also a fierce critique of the romanticised myths of the settlement of the American west. In the end the reader understands the country’s twin potential for horror and hope.” -Whiting Award Citation Håkan’s epic journey reminds us how the self is often hammered into existence by pain and longing. He does this in language that can be plainspoken and wildly, even cosmically, evocative. It’s the second that makes the first feel new. “Hernan Diaz explores two kinds of wilderness: the immensely taxing newness of the American West and the still-forming interiority of Håkan, a Swedish immigrant desperate to find a way back home. And its ability to create lustrous mindscapes from wide-open spaces, from voids that are never empty." - The New York Times
An affecting oddness is the great virtue of In the Distance, along with its wrenching evocations of its main character’s loneliness and grief. "Strange and transporting. A weirdness to which a reader willingly submits, because of the vigorous beauty of words. In the Distance an uncanny achievement: an original Western. "A gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition." Pulitzer Prize Finalist Citation
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