Anyone who enjoyed Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir, I AM, I AM, I AM, or her Shakespeare-inspired work of fiction, HAMNET, will be delighted that her third novel, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US --- originally published in the United Kingdom in 2004 --- is finally available in the United States in a paperback edition. An unusual multilayered love story, the book possesses the psychological acuity and fine writing that are hallmarks of O’Farrell’s other work.

Employing a non-chronological narrative, O’Farrell focuses on the stories of Stella Gilmore and Jake Kildoune, both around 30 years old, who meet at a country-lodge hotel in the Scottish Highlands. Stella, the product of an Italian mother and Scottish father, impulsively has left behind her radio broadcasting job in London and headed north. Jake, who had been working in Hong Kong as the assistant to a film director, moves back to England with Mel, the young woman he married (equally impulsively) as she lay near death in a Hong Kong hospital after being trampled during a celebration of the Chinese New Year.

"THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US is a moody, meditative story whose appeal gradually grows through the accretion of small but significant conversations among the characters and their reflections on those moments, rather than dramatic plot developments."

Jake is the offspring of a brief affair between his mother, Caroline, and a Scottish man he knows only as “Tom,” as she made her way across the Himalayas after leaving her home in Wales as a teenager. Caroline never learned the last name of her son’s father, so she appropriated “Kildoune,” the location in the Highlands where Tom told her he’d started a commune. Leaving Mel with her parents in London, where he’s been living unhappily with her as she recuperates from her injuries, Jake takes a train to Scotland, looking for a place that has assumed an almost mythical status in his mind, not least because it’s impossible to locate on any map.

Jake makes his way to the hotel, where Stella is working as an assistant to the owner, and he is hired to work as a handyman. O’Farrell takes her time bringing the two characters into a meaningful encounter, delaying even their first meeting to the midpoint of the novel. It would be fair to say that their attraction, while apparent, is hardly electric at the outset. In part, that’s because there’s an elusive quality to Stella, so that if Jake goes looking for her in the lodge, “he finds only empty corridors, deserted rooms, but with doors swinging shut, curtains moving in the breeze, as if she’s always just out of reach.” But more daunting to any relationship’s unfolding is the fact of Jake’s marriage to Mel --- passionless as it is for him and as much as he’d dearly love to end it --- something he dreads revealing to Stella when it becomes clear that their feelings for each other are emerging.

Alongside the principal narrative is an intriguing subplot that traces the relationship between Stella and her older and more mercurial sister, Nina, which seems to exist in a hermetically sealed container that holds both love and conflict. Even their mother admits that they “baffle her, frustrate her, drain her,” as she concedes that “without meaning to, she has created two distinctly square pegs in a world full of round holes.”

Central to that story is the account of the year that Nina spent as a child hospitalized in Edinburgh with a near-fatal virus. When she emerges, in a role reversal, Stella takes on the status of her protector against the merciless bullying of her classmates that culminates in the novel’s most dramatic scene. The many episodes that feature the sisters’ interactions with each other and their mother, Francesca --- both as children and as adults --- provide some of its most artfully drawn moments.

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US is a moody, meditative story whose appeal gradually grows through the accretion of small but significant conversations among the characters and their reflections on those moments, rather than dramatic plot developments. All of these scenes are skillfully crafted, manifesting both an attention to detail and a fine-grained feel for the subtlety of complex characters’ moods and motivations. It’s exciting to see the evidence of O’Farrell’s talent in one of her early works, long before she became well-known to American readers. The decision to publish this novel and other entries in her back catalog in the United States certainly is a welcome one.