In the Distance

A ook very well written but at some point a bit too repetitive.

Though the novel does not quite live up to the hype, it is a beautifully written tall tale. A lot of tension is created by the contrast between the poetic language and the realistically violent episodes set in the old West.

I liked this book - a good tale, a sort of left-field Western. It’s a bit surreal in parts, which some people didn’t like, but for me this gave it an interesting edge. I can see why it was a contender for a prize – for me four-star read.The four stars are for the author; the publisher gets zero stars after the mess they made of chapter 20. Whole chunks of text, in one case over half a page, are repeated word-for-word a few pages later, clearly the result of some careless cutting and pasting. Mine’s a paperback and I’m told the Kindle version’s the same so the bug’s probably in the master manuscript. So the proofreaders (if there were any) didn’t read it properly and neither did the Pulitzer nor the Pen/Faulkner judges. Schocking.