Singer Distance
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An NPR, The Millions, and PopSugar Best Book of 2022
A Vulture, Tor.com, LitHub, Philadelphia Inquirer, Debutiful, DailyHive, Gizmodo, and ALTA Journal Best Book of Fall
CALIBA Golden Poppy Award Winner
“Surprising, captivating, surpassingly intelligent.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations
For fans of Station Eleven and Light from Other Stars, Ethan Chatagnier’s propulsive, genre-bending debut novel asks: what happens when we discover intelligent life just next door? And what does it really mean to know we’re not alone in the universe?
The odds of the planet next door hosting intelligent life are—that’s not luck. That’s a miracle. It means something.
In December 1960, Crystal Singer, her boyfriend Rick, and three other MIT grad students take a cross-country road trip from Boston to Arizona to paint a message in the desert. Mars has been silent for thirty years, since the last time Earth solved one of the mathematical proofs the Martian civilization carved onto its surface. The latest proof, which seems to assert contradictory truths about distance, has resisted human understanding for decades. Crystal thinks she’s solved it, and Rick is intent on putting her answer to the test—if he can keep her from cracking under the pressure on the way. But Crystal’s disappearance after the experiment will set him on a different path than he expected, forever changing the distance between them.
Filled with mystery and wonder, Ethan Chatagnier’s Singer Distance is a novel about ambition, loneliness, exploration, and love—about how far we’re willing to go to communicate with a distant civilization, and the great lengths we’ll travel to connect with each other here on Earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chatagnier's soaring debut novel (after the collection Warnings from the Future) centers on a group of five MIT grad students who head west in their attempt to contact extraterrestrial beings. In the early 1960s, Rick and his girlfriend Crystal, along with three friends Ronnie, Otis, and Priya, spend their Christmas traveling along Route 66. Crystal's father, an academic statistician, told her stories when she was a little girl about Mars and the mathematical messages rumored in the early 1920s to have been carved into its surface in response to contact attempts. After scrutiny, she thinks she has solved the mystery of the latest Martian mathematical message and attempts to respond by planting flags in the Arizona desert. When lovestruck Rick realizes Crystal has gone missing, he searches for clues to her whereabouts and ends up looking for her in California. Chatagnier does an excellent job channeling the hippie students' grit, joy, and constant self-awareness. Rick, describing the group in his narration, says they're "dirty as beggars but we were grinning," and he offers enriching development of all the characters as Rick incrementally solves the mystery of Crystal's whereabouts. The elements of astronomy, numerology, love, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life are structured perfectly as each of the five commit to their "long-shot missions and desperate hopes." Readers are in for a memorable adventure.
