Gripping, insightful and deft.
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US by Maggie O'Farrell is a haunting story of the way our families shape our lives. It was winner of the Somerset Maugham Award. On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.

A gift for storytelling wrapped in gold paper and tied with bows
"The Distance Between Us is a love story about two people who have never met." The précis on the inside cover of Maggie O'Farrell's latest novel throws down such an outsize gauntlet that I delayed reading the book to see if I could work out how she was going to perform the trick. "Don't tell me, I'll get it in a minute" I mumbled.

If any writer could ignite passion between two characters oblivious to each other, Maggie O'Farrell would surely be the one. She's already written a glittering love story about the dead in After You'd Gone, so remote-control devotion should be a doddle. The précis is misleading I'm afraid. The love story begins only after the two main characters, on separate trajectories from London and Hong Kong, collide in a remote part of Scotland. In other words they do meet after all. So why am I telling you all this? Simply because it underlines the fundamental expectation about a new Maggie O'Farrell novel. Her gift for storytelling is wrapped in gold paper and tied with 15 velvet bows. Give her any synopsis you like and she would probably make it work.

She specialises in characters with split identities and bags of secrets. Maggie O'Farrell sees doubleness in the way that the rest of us see it only at the opticians with funny glasses on. In The Distance Between Us, broad beans "have metamorphosed: a puckered, toughened hide clings close to twin halves" and the principal character Stella looks at a diagram of the body "seeing for the first time the way our heart is always full of two opposing elements".
Stella, like every self-respecting O'Farrell character, is as studded with secrets as a pomander. She is so close to her sister Nina that they occupy separate halves of the same identity. Stella has done something wicked and Nina has pledged to keep her secret safe for ever. They're Scottish-Italian (yet more doubleness) and feel frayed from both strands of their lineage. Bring on Jake, British but brought up in Hong Kong speaking Cantonese. By sleight of hand, Jake finds himself, bizarrely and shockingly, married to a woman he doesn't love within hours of the novel's opening scene. The alchemical trick is for him to be transformed from a Cantonese-speaking Welshman with the wrong girl into an English-speaking Scotsman with the right girl.

Maggie O'Farrell has a magical talent for writing sensuous love scenes which are somehow touchingly old-fashioned. Jake's longing for Stella is exquisite. I read it with a half shudder. And the fleeting glance is, after all, how O'Farrell characters communicate best. The modest shreds of dialogue are of the hesitant "Sorry, I didn't mean to, I... " variety. The real meaning is derived from what characters do and the disorientating swoosh backwards and forwards between past and present tenses.”
Charlie Lee-Potter, 29 February 2004
The Independent

“In the opening pages of Maggie O'Farrell's third novel, film assistant Jake Kildoune is celebrating the Chinese New Year in Hong Kong with his girlfriend Mel, when they are caught in a street crush, and Mel is seriously injured. At the same time, in London, Stella Gilmore is returning from work at a radio station when she sees a red-haired man on Waterloo Bridge who alarms her so much that she flees the country. What do these people's lives have to do with each other and why will they connect in northern Scotland? Similar mysteries of fate and chance drive all O'Farrell's novels, and keep readers breathless: gripping and compulsively readable.”
Elaine Showalter, 6 March 2004
The Guardian

Maggie O’Farrell werd in 1972 geboren in Noord-Ierland en groeide op in Wales en Schotland. Ze werkte als journalist voor onder andere The Independent on Sunday, maar legt zich nu volledig toe op schrijven. Ze woont en werkt in Edinburgh. Van Maggie O'Farrell verschenen in een Nederlandse vertaling “Het verdwenen leven van Esme Lennox”, “De hand die de mijne vasthield”, (winnaar van de Costa Novel Award), “Voorbij de liefde” en “Als de regen niet valt”.