Review
“Without equivocation, Distance is the best novel of the year, an intimate tale of fathers and sons with epic scope and mythic resonances.… A masterwork from one of Canada’s too-little-appreciated literary giants.”
–Vancouver Sun
“A glorious, funny, redemptive look at the losses of faith we all suffer as we grow older and our need to still try to hold on to what matters.”
–David Adams Richards
“It is, simply, a fundamentally human tale stunningly told.… It’s funny and touching, with a hard-earned sentimentality that rings utterly true.”
–National Post
“[Distance has] a universal theme that will resonate with readers everywhere.… Hodgins is an expert storyteller. His descriptions of Australia’s harsh, magnificent outback are as compelling as his view of Vancouver Island. Distance is a terrific read.…”
–London Free Press
“Jack Hodgins’s Distance seems to pull all of his extraordinary range of experience together into one maddening, masterful whole.… By turns harrowing and hilarious.… A beguiling combination of the highly unlikely and the inevitable – mirroring the strange alchemy of real life.… Hodgins has a rare gift for creating characters at once familiar and larger than life.… Hodgins continues to live up to his billing as one of the finest
–Vancouver Sun
“Hodgins’s stories have always displayed a remarkable energy of language and invention. His style here is supple, natural, familiar. This is a highly skilled and experienced writer.…[Hodgins has] a master’s effortless evocations of place, West Coast and antipodean.”
–Greg Hollingshead, Globe and Mail
“Jack Hodgins takes the traditional themes of a quest for identity and relationships and creates refreshing insights.… Hodgins presents the ordinary in an extraordinary way.…”
–Winnipeg Free Press
“Distance is a masterful blend of humour and seriousness, and of the ugly and the beautiful. Hodgins brings an inventiveness to what might have been a po-faced family saga in less innovative hands. It’s this quality – the freshness of the characters and narrative – as well as the depth of feeling in the novel that makes Hodgins’s reputation so well-deserved.”
–Uptown Magazine
“An often hilarious, bittersweet romp.…”
–Ottawa Citizen
“It is a quest that shimmers with surrealistic and yet fully believable incidents.”
–Toronto Star
From the Hardcover edition.
Distance FROM THE PUBLISHER
"You better get home fast. Your father's taken a turn for the worse."
Sonny Aalto couldn't wait to leave home. After his mother disappeared when Sonny was a little kid, his father did a lousy job of raising him. So now that Sonny is in his fifties, a hugely successful businessman in Ottawa with a couple of grown kids, he never thinks of the old man back home on Vancouver Island.
Until the old man gets sick and Sonny has to fly home, and his life changes. To his horror he finds that the old man has six months to live, and can't cope on his own. What is to be done?
Every reader will sympathize with Sonny's predicament. Finding a retirement home for his cranky Dad is so tough that he decides to leave it all behind and take a trip with him to Australia. From Sydney they head for the middle of the Australian outback to confront Sonny's long-lost mother and find a whole new family of half-brothers - not to mention hunting wild boars and being swept away in a flash flood in the desert.
After Australia, the book returns to Vancouver Island, but along the way to Cape Scott (pictured on the cover) Sonny learns hard lessons about fathers and sons, finds love, and discovers the dangers of too much distance.
Partly comic, partly tragic, and packed full of both incidents and characters, this book is a feast of humanity and shows Jack Hodgins at his best.
Art & Photography
Book Info
