The Distance Between Us - Softcover

Hamilton, Masha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932961143 ISBN 13: 9781932961140

Publisher: Unbridled Books, 2005

Synopsis

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.”

About this title

From the Author:

It was the summer of 1994 and I was back in the states after a decade spent covering bloody clashes in the Middle East and the turbulent collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union when I first heard the news about Kevin Carter. I already knew him as a member of the Bang Bang Club – a group of photojournalists based in South Africa and notorious for their often-reckless coverage of apartheid’s final deadly days. I’d seen his Pulitzer-winning photograph, published by the New York Times, which personified the heartbreak of the Sudanese famine with the image of a tiny girl squatting on scrawny knees, head drooping heavily to the ground, a vulture lurking behind. The image haunted me, in part, because the girl was close to the age of my own daughter. Close to the age of Carter’s daughter, as well.

I wasn’t prepared for the news of that July. Two months after he’d collected what he’d called the highest acknowledgment possible of his work, and had been feted and praised, Carter parked his red pickup truck near a small river where he used to play as a boy, attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and gassed himself to death. "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist," he wrote in a note he left on the passenger seat.

About the Author:

A former foreign correspondent, journalist Masha Hamilton, worked with Associated Press in the Middle East,was a Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and reported for NBC/Mutual Radio. Her first novel, Staircase of a Thousand Steps, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers selection. The Distance Between Us is her second novel. She lives in New York City, where she teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop.

About this edition

• Publisher: Unbridled Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1932961143
• ISBN 13: 9781932961140
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304