Strengthening community through the shared experience of a book.
A good book is an immersive experience, an opportunity for the reader to get lost in imagination and explore a new world. A great book does that and more — it brings a community together to discuss, debate, and share in its wonder.
In the Distance, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz, is a great book — and even better than that, it is the WestportREADS 2025 book selection.
The Westport Library is thrilled to announce this year’s selection and even more excited to welcome Diaz to the Trefz Forum on Thursday, February 13, for a conversation with Connecticut Public's Catherine Shen (Where We Live) on his book, about a young Swedish immigrant who travels east from California in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west.
The Library's full allotment of copies of the book are available for borrowing now. In the Distance is also available as a digital copy (e-book) and as an audiobook!
Created in 2002, WestportREADS is a way for the Westport community to bond over a book and is designed to deepen our community’s engagement in literature.
Throughout January and February, there will be events and programs centered on In the Distance, book discussions, celebrations, and much more. It is a chance to not only read a great book but to engage with the community, meet new people, and celebrate our shared love of reading.
WestportREADS is funded by the estate of Jerry A. Tishman.
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of two novels published in 37 languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”
Related: WestportREADS Q&A with Hernan Diaz
His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade.
Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by more than 30 publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO, and it has been named one of The New York Times’s Best 100 Books of the 21st Century.
Diaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.
He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others.
Diaz holds a PhD from NYU and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.
"A gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition." —Pulitzer Prize Finalist Citation
"Strange and transporting. … A weirdness to which a reader willingly submits, because of the vigorous beauty of [Diaz's] words. … In the Distance [is] an uncanny achievement: an original Western. … An affecting oddness is the great virtue of In the Distance, along with its wrenching evocations of its main character’s loneliness and grief. And its ability to create lustrous mindscapes from wide-open spaces, from voids that are never empty." —The New York Times
"A brilliant debut. ... This suspenseful novel is a potent depiction of loneliness, a memorable immigration narrative, and a canny reinvention of the old-school western." —Publishers Weekly, Top 10 Books of 2017
“Though painstaking in its historical detail (without succumbing to the obsessive’s need to show off) In the Distance has the feel of a very contemporary story, capturing as it does the struggle and the will at the heart of migration, along with the cruelties that inevitably surround it.” —Lit Hub, “The 20 Best Novels of the Decade”
“As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs [Hawk’s] adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. . . . An ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.” —Kirkus, "13 Fiction Debuts & Breakthroughs That Live up to the Hype"
"In the Distance did something new, subverting the Western genre and, in so doing, raising important questions about cultural attitudes made evident by assumptions we make about art, particularly toward guns and immigrants. It’s also just a great story." —The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2017
In the Distance: A Reader's Guide
For Kids
The Donner Dinner Party by Nathan Hale
Koda by Patricia Hermes
Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel by Leslie Connor
My America by Karen Katz
One Big Open Sky by Lesa Cline-Ransome
The Oregon Trail by Leonard Everett Fisher
The Race to Chimney Rock by Jesse Wiley
Ranger in Time. Rescue on the Oregon Trail by Kate Messner
The Shattered Horn by Erin Hunter
Some Kind of Courage by Dan Gemeinhart
Stuart Little by E.B. White
The Wagon Train Trek by Jesse Wiley
The Wild Mustang: Horses of the American West by Chris Duffy
Will’s Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes
For Teens
Brighter than the Sun by Daniel Aleman
Butterfly Yellow by Thanhha Lai
Under a Painted Sky by Stacey Lee
2024: The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
2023: Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley
2022: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
2021: Towards a More Perfect Union: Confronting Racism
2020: Our Vote, Our Future
2019: Exit West, by Moshin Hamid
2018: Regeneration, by Pat Barker
2017: Bettyville, a Memoir by George Hodgman
