The Distance Between Us [SIGNED COPY, FIRST PRINTING]

Masha Hamilton worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press for five years in the Middle East, where she covered the intefadeh, the peace process and the partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Then she spent five years in Moscow, where she was a Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a newspaper column, "Postcard from Moscow," that ran in about 35 U.S. newspapers, and reported for NBC/Mutual Radio. She wrote about Kremlin politics as well as life for average Russians under Gorbachev and Yeltsin during the coup and collapse of the Soviet Union. She traveled to Afghanistan in the spring of 2004 as a freelance journalist. A Brown University graduate, she was awarded the Arizona Arts biannual Fellowship for Fiction in 2002 and attended Yaddo in June of 2003. She currently lives with her family in New York City, where she teaches novel writing for Gotham Writers' Workshop and is a shiatsu practitioner. The Distance Between Us is her second novel. Her first, Staircase of a Thousand Steps, was a Booksense pick and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.