SOURCE: Quinn, Anthony. Review of Distance, by Colin Thubron. Observer (15 September 1996): 15.

In the following review, Quinn criticizes the “implausibilities” in Distance, but notes that the novel does keep the reader engaged.

The metaphor twinkling over Colin Thubron's new novel [Distance] feels almost too perfect a fit for his stricken narrator. Edward, an edgy young astronomer, has been pursuing research into black holes: ‘The ghosts that haunt our universe … the core of massive stars that have died, collapsed in on themselves aeons ago and shrunk to nuggets of near infinite density.’ Somewhere in the course of his studies, however, Edward has stumbled into a black hole of his own: he has lost his memory, and finds himself sealed off from the past. He was rather proud of his powers of recall before (‘I knew Schrödinger's wave equation by heart’); now he can't even remember the woman he lives...