Fiction Trade Paperback
ISBN: 1-932961-14-3
5½ x 8¼ / 304 Pages / $14.95 / October 2005
Fiction Hardcover
ISBN: 1-932961-02-X
5 ½ x 8 ¼ /
304 Pages /
$24.95 / November 2004
Caddie Blair feels everything strongly—and so she works hard to keep her distance. It's the ethical thing for a journalist to do, especially in a war-torn region like the Middle East. And Caddie wants to believe that nothing is as important as covering "the story."
There's room for passion in her life—but that's only physical. And Caddie keeps even those fleeting attachments under wraps, secretive, because she knows that when a journalist even appears to lose her detachment, she is already lost.
So what is Caddie to feel when her lover dies beside her—shot in an ambush on the way to the next promising political interview, across the Israeli border into Lebanon?
An authentic look at the emotional and ethical chaos within a war correspondent who becomes a bit too involved, Masha Hamilton's The Distance Between Us is a straight-ahead story of human passion—desire, conviction, and the guilt of a survivor—struggling for order within the frayed justice of the Middle East conflict.
A seasoned journalist herself, Masha Hamilton brings to this revealing novel the sharp eye and deep empathy that marked her debut, Staircase of a Thousand Steps (BlueHen, 2001). Beautifully turned, and peopled with an astounding cast of characters who are as true as they are perceptive, The Distance Between Us is finally the portrait of one woman's search for the narrow pass between vengeance and emotional survival, when her only true attachment has been torn away from her.
"If we knew where we were going to fall," the novel's most enigmatic character tells her, "we could spread straw."
One of Library Journal's Best Books of the Year, 2004!!!
"A compelling tale of reprisal and endurance with a rich cast of characters. With prose both beguiling and elegant, the story will strike a chord in readers following current events in the Middle East. Recommended for all public libraries." —Library Journal
"[A] great story ... Will get you thinking and break your heart." —iVillage.com
"Searing." —The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Timely, yet timeless ... an eye-opening book for readers far removed from [the Middle East], who only see it through news accounts or on TV." —Newcenturyreading.com
"Bravo to Masha Hamilton. Her superb new novel, The Distance Between Us, captures the life and drama of a female war correspondent—the danger, the romance, the detachment, the intensity of the friendships and the ever-present question of what is real life and what is escape. Writing with uncommon elegance and humorous insight, Hamilton draws deftly on her own experience as a foreign correspondent to make the world of first-class news reporters come alive." —Ann Blackman, journalist and author of Wild Rose, Civil War Spy, A True Story (June 05)
"The plotting is flawless. The pacing is just right—sometimes reflective, sometimes action-packed. Hamilton is an accomplished stylist as well ... Perhaps most unusual of all, Hamilton the journalist gets the fictional journalists just right." —The San Francisco Chronicle
"Thoughtfully written." —Kirkus Reviews
"A page-turner." —Booklist
"[An] exciting novel .... we're left thinking about the human tragedy rather than the political scorecard ... [Hamilton's] determined to plumb the conflicted motives of people who rush to see danger in the world or in their newspaper. The result is a powerful portrayal of religious warfare and an unsettling challenge to anyone watching." —The Christian Science Monitor
"A foreign correspondent’s façade of emotional invincibility is shattered by the death of a colleague in journalist Hamilton’s sharply etched, emotionally ferocious second novel (after Staircase of a Thousand Steps). Thirty-two-year-old Caddie Blair swears by "measured closeness and a dose of dulled feelings," but everything changes after a stunning ambush on the way to an interview with a Lebanese crime king leaves her lover, news photographer Marcus Lancour, dead in her arms. Caddie retreats to her flat in Jerusalem to make sense of her personal involvement in Marcus’s death, refusing to take a cushy desk job in New York and continuing to work both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A mysterious and alluring Russian professor, Alexander Goronsky, offers insider information about terrorist cell activity, feeding Caddie’s need to seek (and witness) revenge ... as edgily paced as a thriller, with its jaded crew of international journalists, scenes of horrific violence by Jews and Arabs alike and explosive sex when Goronsky and Caddie come together ... Hamilton no doubt enlists her own experience as a foreign correspondent to effectively flesh out the characters Caddie encounters ... an affecting, viscerally charged work that offers no easy moral answers." —Publishers Weekly, STARRED
"Engaging from first page to last.... I could endlessly quote passages of glorious prose from this book, but won't. I'll let readers discover Hamilton's gifted way with words for themselves. The author has given us the scents, sights, and sounds of Jerusalem, the sorrows shared by Israeli and Arab cousins. And she's put starkly realistic faces on human weaknesses and strengths. Unbridled Books has picked a winner here." —Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review
"What a powerful, intense, beautifully written story. Masha Hamilton takes us right into the brutal heart of the war zone, right into the guarded heart of journalist Caddie Blair. With spare and stunning prose, Hamilton reminds us that the distance between us often isn't as great as we may think." —Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds, winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change
For ten years, Masha Hamilton worked as a foreign correspondent overseas, first for the Associated Press in the Middle East and then as a Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Masha covered the intefadeh, the peace process, and the partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Later, she reported on the coup and collapse of the Soviet Union and the growing independence in Soviet republics as well as Kremlin politics. She reported from Afghanistan in the spring of 2004. She currently lives with her family in New York City, where she teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop. Her is also the author of another novel, Staircase of a Thousand Steps.