The Distance Between Us was published by Headline Review in 2004, O’Farrell’s third novel and the work that consolidated her reputation as one of the most formally inventive literary novelists in Britain. The novel uses a dual-narrative structure to build toward a connection between its two protagonists that neither they nor the reader can see until the final pages — when the revelation recontextualizes everything that has preceded it.
Stella lives in London with her partner Jake, but their relationship is failing in the quiet, incremental way that long partnerships fail — through accumulations of resentment, through conversations not had, through the distance that grows between two people who share a bed but no longer share an interior life. She takes a temporary job at a Hong Kong bookshop, seeking geographical distance to clarify emotional distance.
Jake is in Scotland, visiting his estranged father and trying to understand his mother — dead when he was a boy — through the fragments she left behind: photographs, letters, a life lived before he existed. His investigation into her history is also an investigation into his own identity: who was she before she was his mother? What did she want? What did she sacrifice?
O’Farrell’s structural control is extraordinary: the two narratives run parallel, apparently disconnected, building toward a convergence that arrives with the force of inevitability. The “distance between us” is simultaneously literal (London to Hong Kong, Scotland to London) and metaphorical (the gap between who we are and who we present to others, between parents and children, between present selves and past selves).
Collecting The Distance Between Us
First edition (Headline Review, London, 2004): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $20–$50