The Distance from Home

In this richly textured novel that spans two continents and vastly different worlds, Daniel Jacobs eloquently shows how love orders all things.  In The Distance From Home, a group of friends searches the mountaintops of Nepal for the happiness that eludes them at home.  Their unforgettable journey is gripping, hopeful and heartbreaking.  Weaving together friendship, art, politics and the need for love in our lives, The Distance From Home is a deeply intelligent and impressive exploration of the human heart. 

- Mary E. Mitchell Author of Americans in Space and Starting Out Sideways, PEN Discovery Award Winner for Fiction

 I couldn’t put down The Distance from Home.  Dan Jacobs has given us a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey, with a female protagonist whose restless travels reflect an early traumatic loss.  Jacobs combines a skillful capacity for observing and rendering relationships with a psychoanalytic awareness of the inevitable impediments and challenges to reaching “home” – the security of self-knowledge and relatedness.

 -Richard Almond, Psychoanalyst, co-author of The Therapeutic Narrative: Fictional Relationships and the Process of Psychological Change

In this perceptive novel, the distance from home is greater than the miles between Manhattan and Kathmandu.  When seven middle-aged friends leave their complex lives to trek the Himalayas, the physical demands and proximity to one another begin to fray everyone’s nerves.  Then Hannah, our sharp-eyed, vulnerable narrator is stricken with life-threatening illness and everything changes radically. Dan Jacobs unspools an insightful and riveting story.  

Sally Brady, Author of A Box of Darkness