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.'
"One of the strengths of this novel is that it does not judge. Caddie is portrayed as a suffering person responding authentically to loss. Along with Caddie, the reader slips into a charged space, where the air becomes too dense to breathe, or hisses and loses pressure like a deflating balloon. The near-universal desire for revenge becomes all too convincing."
The Jerusalem Post
"A great story....Will get you thinking and break your heart."
iVillage.com
"The plotting is flawless. The pacing is just right - sometimes reflective, sometimes action-packed. Hamilton is an accomplished stylist as well... Perhaps most unusual of all, Hamilton the journalist gets the fictional journalists just right."
