Distance

Some grief cannot be spoken aloud. Some losses have no official name.

When someone close to him dies suddenly, Andrew Irvine is left with something worse than heartbreak: a grief he cannot explain to anyone. Not to his wife. Not to his oldest friend. Not even, quite, to himself.

Andrew is a Scottish literature professor at Columbia: a man who quotes Shakespeare instinctively and feels most alive in a classroom or a pub. He is also, it turns out, a man of extraordinary self-deception. As his marriage quietly unravels and he spars with a therapist he is determined to outwit, the full weight of what he has lost begins to surface. And with it, what he never knew he was losing.

Distance is a darkly funny, deeply felt novel about the things we carry alone. About love that doesn't fit the approved categories. About marriage as a long and mutual forgetting. About the performance of being fine when nothing is fine at all.

Told in fragments, flashbacks, and stolen moments of honesty, it moves between New York and Scotland, between grief and dark comedy. Sincere and ironic at once, heartbroken and funny, sometimes in the same sentence.

A portrait of a man who has spent a lifetime keeping people at arm's length. And who is only now beginning to understand the cost.

Funny, honest, and quietly devastating, Distance is metamodern in the truest sense: aching sincerely while laughing at its own absurdity.