In the Distance
A Swedish boy lands in California and walks the wrong way across a country he cannot read.
Hakan Soderstrom, a Swedish boy separated from his brother en route to New York, lands instead in California and starts walking east against the whole tide of westward migration. He grows enormous, becomes a legend he does not recognise, and understands almost nothing that is said to him. Diaz published it with a small press in 2017 and it reached the Pulitzer finalists, a western that removes every convention of the western except the distance.
Recommended by 1 Person
Nathan Harris
For its prose alone, this is such a gorgeous novel. But beneath the sentence level, this story about a 19th-century journey from California to the other end of the country lights upon everything that a good adventure novel might be.
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