advance praise for The Distance Home
“In The Distance Home, a family’s story – its past, its 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.”
“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.”
“The Distance Home is a deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family – its promises and disruptions – surrounded by a rich, shimmering, sensuous South Dakota landscape.”
“Paula Saunders has given us a riveting family saga for the ages. The Distance Home is fresh, with a seductive Midwestern innocence, though the book’s outwardly ideal clan holds dark secrets that kept me turning pages into the wee hours. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years – destined to become a classic.”
“An extraordinary debut...The Distance Home is heartbreaking 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.”
“Set in the isolation of South Dakota prairie towns and then the provincialism of Rapid City, The Distance Home is an exemplary story of what hardworking people suffered in Middle America in the late twentieth century while striving to achieve dreams. This soul-searching first novel offers everywhere that most mysterious and essential of artistic achievements: heart.”
