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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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THE DISTANCE HOME

Paula Saunders

A "riveting family saga" (Mary Karr) set in the American West, about sibling rivalry, dark secrets, and a young girl's struggle with freedom and artistic desire.
Set in a circa-1960s rural South Dakota--a hardscrabble place of cattle buyers, homegrown ballet studios, casual drug abuse, and unmitigated pressure to conform, all amid the great, vast natural beauty of the region--the book portrays a loving but struggling young family in turmoil, and two siblings, Rene and Leon, who opt for different but equally extreme means of escaping the burdens of home.

By turns funny and tragic, lyrical and terse, Paula Saunders's debut examines elements of human nature: it is an affecting novel, in which the author's compassionate narration allows us to sympathize, in turn, with everyone involved.

This novel draws on Paula's family history--both her father and her grandfather were independent cattle brokers and her mother a homemaker who then became a dance instructor. Paula grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota and left home at 15 to study ballet, eventually moving to New York City where she danced as an apprenticeship with the Harkness Ballet, under renowned ballet master David Howard.

The author graduated Syracuse University Creative Writing Program (where she studied with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger) and is a recipient of the prestigious Schweitzer Humanities Fellowship at SUNY Albany, where she studied with Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband (author George Saunders).
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Published 2018-08-07 by Random House

Book

Published 2018-08-07 by Random House

Comments

UK and Commonwealth: Picador UK

Paula Saunders' The Distance Home is a bracing and beautiful novel about a fierce struggle for love and understanding in a South Dakota family, and about aspiration (both thwarted and encouraged) in an unforgiving place. Read it - it will break your heart and open it up.

"Paula Saunders' The Distance Home is a coming-of-age story of an artistically talented girl who grows up amid the emotional turmoil of a dysfunctional family she yearns to save. Set in the isolation of South Dakota prairie towns and then the gossipy provincialism of Rapid City, this novel is an exemplary story of what hard-working people suffered in middle America in the late 20th century while striving to achieve dreams--material and personal--that always seemed just out of reach. Every word of The Distance Home should strike readers as honest, and true, and more--this soul-searching first novel offers everywhere that most mysterious and essential of artistic achievements: heart."

An extraordinary debut. Paula Saunders writes beautiful, evocative prose that engages you in every aspect of this world. The Distance Home is heart-breaking and full of compassion while also managing to be exacting, precise and truthful. It accomplishes what great fiction should: we get a glimpse of our own humanity - a hard-won clarity - through the story of this particular haunted family and the woman who moved on, survived, but never exactly left.

"In Paula Saunders' The Distance Home, a family's story--its past, present, and (most surprising) its future--traces the intricate, often subterranean lines that connect damage to redemption, creation to dissolution, and the everyday to the eternal, just to name several of its moving and startling aspects. It's a true, and rare, accomplishment."

A deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family . . . rich, shimmering, sensuous.

"Paula Saunders has given us a riveting family saga for the ages. . . . fresh with a seductive Midwestern innocence though the book's outwardly ideal clan holds dark secrets that kept me turning pages in the wee hours. One of the best books I've read in years--destined to become a classic."

This debut wonderfully depicts the entire lifespan of a singular family.