Distance

Some grief cannot be spoken aloud. Some losses have no official name.

When someone close to him dies suddenly, Andrew Irvine is left with something worse than heartbreak: a grief he cannot explain to anyone. Not to his wife. Not to his oldest friend. Not even, quite, to himself.

Andrew is a Scottish literature professor at Columbia: a man who quotes Shakespeare instinctively and feels most alive in a classroom or a pub. He is also, it turns out, a man of extraordinary self-deception. As his ...