The Distance Home
Published in 2018, The Distance Home is Paula Saunders's debut novel, set across the Great Plains in the 1960s and 1970s. It follows Eve and her younger brother Leon as they grow up in Rapid City, South Dakota, the children of a struggling cattle broker father and a watchful mother. Both children are drawn to dance, and Eve's discipline carries her toward a professional career while Leon, more gifted but more fragile, is pulled in other directions by a father who pushes him toward more conventional masculinity. Across decades the novel traces how a family can love its children and still fail them, and how addiction, mental illness, and inherited expectations can shape a life. Saunders writes in clear, observant prose praised by her husband George Saunders, Marilynne Robinson, and others. The novel was widely praised on release in 2018.
What you might want to know about The Distance Home
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Paula Saunders's debut novel about a sister and brother growing up in 1960s and 1970s South Dakota.
Saunders has said it draws on her own South Dakota childhood and family, though the events and characters are fictional.
Paula Saunders is married to George Saunders, but her novel is realist and quiet in a different register from his short fiction.
The Distance Home was written by Paula Saunders, published in 2018 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.
The Distance Home is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Distance Home takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Distance Home is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
